Afriwave deal: NCA denies fraud allegations by IMANI Ghana

The National Communications Authority (NCA) is accusing Policy Think Tank, IMANI Ghana for attempting to damage the hard worn reputation of the authority by alleging fraud in the award of Interconnection Clearing House (ICH) license to Afriwave Ghana Limited.

Addressing a press conference in Accra on Thursday, the Director of the National Communications Authority, William Tevie denied the allegation, stating that there was no fraud or rigging in the selection process for the ICH license.

“The NCA wishes to clearly state that the assertion raised in the public domain is regrettable and unfortunately misleading and we wish to assure our stakeholders that we will continue to undertake our regulatory functions with integrity and transparency to ensure quality provision of ICT regulatory interventions for the benefits of Ghanaians,” he stressed.

The National Communications Authority (NCA) on December 2, 2014, invited applications for the granting of a license to enable service providers establish, maintain and operate a clearing house service for the telecommunication industry.

Five institutions applied for the contract, including; Afriwave Telecom Ghana Limited, Subah Infosolutions, Progidy International Limited, TCMS-GVG Consortium Limited and Channel IT Limited.

But an eight member Application Evaluation Panel (AEP) chaired by Albert E. Enninful, and set up by the NCA to vet the bidders, awarded the contract to Afriwave under circumstances IMANI Ghana says “clearly betrayed the scheme’s parochial intentions.”

In an IMANI Alert issued on Monday, it accused the Application Evaluation Panel of skewing the evaluation processes to ensure that Afriwave won the contract.

But Mr. William Tevie disagreed.

He said the AEP worked with a technical team from the NCA who provided them with all the necessary materials to facilitate the panel’s work to ensure an objective selection of the winner of the bid process.

“We clarify what happened specifically with the award of points in the various areas of the license application evaluation process and as we indicated in our earlier response that AEP, in the preparation of the report, transferred the scores from excel to Microsoft Word. They then noticed that there were some errors with regard to the scores, in which situation the errors were corrected and there are verifiable correspondence to that effect. It should be noted that after the corrections, the total scores remained the same, with Afriwave as having obtained the most points.”

Mr. Tevie was worried that the ongoing suspicion and speculation surrounding the contract could create a sense of distrust in the activities of state institutions and urged the public to avoid it.

Story by: Michael Creg Afful

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