Pantami who exerted so much influence under the Muhammadu Buhari government had wanted to repeal the National Information Technology Development Agency Act 28 (2007) and enact “National Information Technology Development Agency Act, to provide for the administration, implementation, regulation of Information Technology systems and practices as well as digital economy in Nigeria and for other related matters.”
The bill sought to change Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, into a full blown regulatory agency and subsume the regulatory powers of the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, and the Nigerian Communications Act 2003.
Investigations showed that Pantami had secretly forwarded the Bill to the National Assembly and it was hurriedly passed by the Senate on May 16, 2023, in a desperate bid to secure Presidential assent before the May 29 expiration of the tenure of President Buhari.
The bill, however, ran into a brick wall in the House of Representatives where Pantami could not effectively maneuver his way through any of the committees.
It was learnt that hours after the Senate was deceived into passing the strange bill, it was pushed to the House for concurrence and was subsequently smuggled into the Order Paper for debate even when it was not originally scheduled to be debated.
The inclusion of the Bill in the Order Paper was said to have angered the Presiding Speaker, Gbajabiamila, who handed a warning to the Clerk of the House that he does not want the “smuggled” Bill in the Order Paper of the Nigerian House of Representatives again.
That pronouncement by Mr Speaker was said to be the masterstroke that finally killed the Pantami Bill and saved Nigeria from potential embarrassment and loss of investor confidence in the telecom industry, considered to be the best performing sector in the country since the return to democracy in 1999.
Had it been passed, the Pantami bill would have subsumed some functions and powers of the NCC, the authorized Nigeria telecom regulator which has been variously adjudged the best telecom regulator in Africa and one of the best in the world.
The Bill would also have subsumed the technical department of the Ministry of Science and Technology, the engineering directorate of the National Broadcasting Commission, NBC, and would have yielded control of Galaxy Backbone to NITDA making it a Super Regulator.
Further checks revealed that to smoothen the journey of the Bill through the National Assembly, Pantami found an ally in the then Chairman of the Senate Committee on Information Communications Technology, ICT, Senator Yakubu Oseni.
It was gathered that Pantami carefully avoided going through the Senate Committee on Communications headed by Senator Oluremi Tinubu, now the First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for fear the Tinubu committee would shut down the Bill.
Senator Tinubu who was vocal for defending the telecom sector and its stakeholders including investors and consumers, according to industry sources, would have declared the Pantami bill dead on arrival had he passed it through her committee.
To push the bill through, Senator Oseni convoked a public hearing on the bill by the joint committee of the Senate and Reps on ICT for December 23, 2022, the day the National Assembly went for Christmas Break.
The ploy was to ensure that only few members of the joint committee will attend to ‘validate’ the bill as packaged by Pantami and passed down as an Executive Bill. The Senate Committee on Communications and the House of Representatives Committee on Telecommunications, chaired by Prince Akeem Adeyemi, were deliberately blanked from the public hearing.
Investigations revealed that the plan to surreptitiously host the public hearing, was to ensure that the bill gets accelerated hearing, and made available for Presidential Assent on December 28, 2022 at the resumption from Christmas break by the National Assembly.
At the scheduled hearing, critical stakeholders like the NCC; NBC; Association of Licensed Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, ALTON; Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, ATCON; Nigerian Computer Society, NCS; Nigeria Internet Group, NIG; Computer and Allied Product Dealers Association, CAPDAN; Investors, and experts, were not invited by the committee, having realised their rejection of the bill in earlier stakeholder meetings.
Some Rep members were said to sharply disagree with Senator Oseni for the short notice, and accused him of showing more interest in the bill than the original sponsors.
Undeterred, Senator Oseni and Pantami devised another strategy by way of a public hearing held on April 27, 2023, this time, by the Senate committee on ICT.
However, to their shock, over 90 percent of stakeholder organizations and individuals in attendance, condemned the bill and requested that it be dropped in the interest of stability of the telecom industry.