Prez. Mills Orders Minister to Allow Glo Operations

President John Evans Atta Mills has directed the Minister for Environment, Science and Technology, Sherry Aryittey, to ensure that Nigerian telecommunications giant Globacom begins full operations in Ghana before the end of 2010. The Minister for Communications, Haruna Iddrisu, who disclosed this on Metro TV’s Good Morning Ghana Show on Thursday November 4, said the President wants the Environment and Communications Ministry to remove all bottlenecks preventing Globacom from starting full operations. According to Hon. Haruna Iddrisu, most of the issues regarding Glo’s activities have been addressed except those to do with the erection of telecom masts which is yet to be thrashed out completely. He gave the assurance that per the President’s directive the two ministries will work rapidly to allow what would be the nation’s sixth telecoms operator offer an alternative. The Nigerian mobile investor in 2009 threatened to withdraw from Ghana amid claims that its infrastructure was being sabotaged. Globacom was issued a license in 2008 and had initially scheduled to launch GSM and WCDMA networks by end-2009. But Globacom is still to launch services in Ghana. The operator claims that its infrastructure has been sabotaged, frequencies have been interfered with and its advertising billboards vandalized. The operator also suffered from a ban on the erection of new mobile masts. Ghana has five mobile operators: Zain, Vodafone, MTN, Millicom (tiGo) and Kasapa. Globacom also runs mobile operations in Nigeria and Benin republic and has invested in sub-marine cable Glo-1. The cable was expected to go live in 2009 with planned landing points in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, Portugal, Spain and UK, but this cable is also yet to be operational.