After the Investment Minister Hon. Evlyne Anite unveiled last week to parliament that the struggling telecom company UTL is approaching a ‘danger zone‘, the company administrators called a press conference to deny all the accusations that the minister told the house last week. UNBRS’s Bemanya Twebaze who was appointed as receiver-manager of Uganda Telecom Limited in May 2017, at a point when it had failed to meet its financial obligations said;
Its is not true that UTL has been sold. We are seriously engaging investors and I hope soon we shall get these investors. We have a full director of internal audit in government who works on a day-to-day basis to supervise our operations. We did a verification exercise and it’s amazing that out of UGX 940 bn we found that UGX 410 bn was fake claims.
Bemanya insists he has neither refused government from accessing UTL premises nor that the administrators denied them the right to audit the company as was alleged by the Minister. He said the UTL is a company that follows the law.
In as far as the work of administration is concerned, the law guides me. The Auditor General is also guided and he is an independent office, Bemanya said.
UCC threatens to withdraw license
This comes at a time when UTL’s operational license is under scrutiny by the Ugandan Communication Commission (UCC) yet again. On 29th April 2019, UCC wrote to Uganda telecom Administrators warning that it will withdraw its licenses due to the company’s failure to comply with regulatory obligations. UCC claims that the administrators of the company never requested for a license renewal and have failed to pay the 2% Gross Annual Revenue with the excuse that it’s still under administration.
It is not the first time UTL has made similar claims to UCC, the same happened last year, as the struggling telecom failed to submit its audited financial statement for the period ending 31st December 2018.
In response to this, Uganda Telecom administrators seem to deny that this financial obligation is the reason why UCC wants to with draws its license, they instead sight network quality issues. They said
The main issue being raised by UCC is the quality of service (QoS) that we are offering versus the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that the commission has set for service provision. The major reason why we are unable to meet some of those KPIs is because we are running a very old network that breaks down every time.
For example, UCC recommends Blocked call rate KPI target to be less than or equal to 2% for all telecom companies but according to the survey done by the commission last year. UTL emerged the worst performing in almost every region where the tests were conducted with blocked call rate as bad as 15% in the central, 22% in the eastern region and 11% in the northern region as shown below. A blocked call is a call attempt, which although is initiated within the coverage area, was not connected by the operator’s network to the called number.
Pensioner Woes: Administrators assure little hope
Former workers have gone to the speaker of parliament Hon Rebecca Kadaga to inform her that this same company never paid their gratuity. These were employees of Uganda Posts and Telecommunication which was later transformed into Uganda Telecom Limited and took over responsibility to pay the complainants. Through their lawyers they have waited for the courts ruling on their matter but to no avail.
In response, UTL administrators said that these are part of their creditors and they will call them to verify the amounts of money that the company owes them. They however cannot pay the pensioners until administration ends.
In a contradictory statement, the UTL Administrators have also said that in November this year, is when they expect to complete their work and will also allow government to audit the work they have been doing.
