President Akufo-Addo (2nd right) receiving a gift from Dr. Ishmael Yamson (left). With them are Ursula Owusu-Ekuful (right) and Selorm Adadevoh (2nd left). Picture by Gifty Ama Lawson.
PRESIDENT NANA Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo yesterday praised telecommunications giant MTN at the Kempinski Hotel in Accra for its sterling performance over the past 25 years since it started operations in Ghana.
He touted the company’s contribution to Ghana’s development through the prompt payment of taxes, which has earned it several awards from the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Commissioner General’s Special and Platinum awards.
“I also, want to thank you very much for your contribution of PPE, vaccines, and other COVID related relief items to support the government’s effort to contain the pandemic,” he said.
He equally acknowledged the company’s support for the Ghana Cares Obatanpa Programme which seeks to revamp the country’s economy post Covid-19.
Assurance
After heaping such accolades on the communications giant, President Akufo-Addo gave assurance of his administration’s commitment to provide the enabling environment for business organisation and sustainability, with a promise to work hard and attract more private sector investments into ICT infrastructure development, digital applications and services.
Again, he highlighted, “We will continue collaborating with you to address and remove any barriers that stifle digital inclusion,” adding that “your entry into the market has proven that and we must all act collectively to ensure the competition thrives in an atmosphere of fairness and equity.”
“We are confident that many more organisations will be inspired by your 25-year journey and success story to emulate your achievements,” he noted.
Appeal
The President, however, appealed to Scancom PLC of some critical concerns of Ghanaians as it sought to improve its services, particularly the affordability, availability, quality, reliability, and speed of its services.
He told the company’s management to strive even harder to attain such goals.
Plans For Future
Selorm Adadevoh, CEO of MTN Ghana, in a speech, said the company’s vision over the next 25 years was “to lead the delivery of a bold new digital world to our customers.”
According to him, such a vision underpinned the sustained investment in the MTN Ghana’s business in the areas of rural connectivity and in implementing digital platforms to give the opportunity to its customers to live a modern connected life.
“To achieve this, we have repositioned our strategy from BRIGHT to Ambition 2025, which aims to build the largest and most valuable platform business with a focus on Africa. Ambition 2025 is anchored on five pillars – Fintech Solutions, Digital/ Ayoba, Enterprise, Network as a Service, and an API Marketplace.
New Frontiers
“In this strategy, we see exciting opportunities for mobile commerce where fintech intersects with our Ayoba business. We are hoping to aggregate APIs to accelerate the digital ecosystem expansion where a customer should never need to interact with an agent to manage their MTN experience. All SMEs should be able to become digital without IT skills in-house by leveraging our platforms and by so doing can pay taxes digitally through MoMo. Also, we should be able to use QR codes for trotro or taxi payments; we must have the ability to pay tolls by scanning car number plates; we should be able to track criminals through digital safety cameras on our streets and from artificial intelligence, identify the national ID card details for a camera image and lastly, we should be able to stamp out MoMo fraud using a similar artificial intelligence identity tracking algorithm.”
Investment This Year
“This year alone, MTN is investing approximately $150 million in the network and IT systems to continue to connect the 15% of Ghanaians in our remotest communities without connectivity and increase capacity and experience for those who already have service.
“We are also committing as part of our 25th anniversary a $25 million fund over three years, to work with Government through the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation to support the development of Ghana’s digital ecosystem. One of the legacy projects we have already committed to is the building of an ICT hub in Ghana,” he said.
Brief History
MTN Ghana, now Scancom PLC, was registered in 1994 and started commercial operations in 1996 with network coverage in Accra and Tema.
The MTN journey started from an office on Graphic road, with 20 employees.
By the year 2006, when it celebrated its 10th anniversary, the company had acquired 2.6 million subscribers, paving way for it to be acquired by the MTN Group.
Today, after 25 years, it has employed over 2,500 Ghanaians and created over half a million jobs including hundreds of thousands of airtime resellers, mobile money agents and mobile money merchants. Currently, it serves about 25 million subscribers.
By Charles Takyi-Boadu, Presidential Correspondent