Majority of these investments were used to create secondary and tertiary links as options when the main links suffer a cut off as a result of situations such as construction works or theft.

Mr Selorm Adadevoh, the Chief Executive Officer of MTN Ghana, who disclosed this when members of Journalist for Business Advocacy (JBA) paid a courtesy call on him in Accra, said the company would continue to invest in enhancing its network capacity to provide quality service to the growing customers.

“For instance two weeks ago we had a situation where the two other links also went down due to external factors, so we will continue to duplicate so we can give our customers a standard service. “Service to our customers’ remains a topmost priority and our budget for next year focus on investing in our network to offer good service,” he noted.

He said the industry players needed to come together to recognize fibre optic as a national asset and be given the maximum protection.  On spectrum, he said the company was at a disadvantage when it comes to allocation and would need more spectrum next year, saying “if you look at how spectrum is allocated in Ghana there is no mechanism of sharing based on the company …there are different companies of different size both big, medium and small are given almost same spectrum.”

“There should be a mechanism to re-allocate the unutilized spectrum to larger companies. We are hoping we can influence some of these policies.” On the recent announcement of National Communication Authority fine, he stated that the company was going to engage the regulator to understand and get more details. Alhaji Suleman Mustapha, President of the Association, said the group over the years had played a leading role by highlighting issues in the industry, including mobile money fraud, projects of MTN Foundation, fibre optic cut and battery theft for change.

JBA was born out of the BUSAC Fund’s collaboration with the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) to highlight issues affecting private sector growth and development. The JBA was primarily formed to help articulate business environment challenges that hamper the growth and success of private sector businesses in Ghana.

In line with this objective, JBA worked together with the Ghana Journalists Association to execute the maiden edition of the Business Advocate Programme on GTV, which exposed the challenges confronting the private sector.