THE INDEPENDENCE OF A REGULATORY AGENCY IN TELECOMMUNICATION LIBERATION: THE ROLE OF THE NATIONAL COMMUNICATION AUTHORITY (NCA)
Introduction Telecommunication is a commercial service but one which is somewhat different from other services in the sense that service supply has social concerns and as such issues of consumer rights, universal service/access, interoperability, standardisation of infrastructure, anti-competitive trading practices, dispute resolution, transparency, information sharing, fair competition, charges and quality of services of telecommunication providers calls for a sector-specific regulatory body or agency to enforce any general related or specific legal provisions. In the past, telecommunication operations have been owned by governments with government officials responsible for policy formulation, regulation by way of policy implementation and the actual operations of the telephone services. With the liberalisation of telecommunication there has been the need to re-organise the structure by separating policy, regulatory and operational functions of telecommunication and the National Com