Chinese tech giant Huawei, which has for more than a decade, controlled an overwhelming majority of technology support services for both state and private institutions in Ghana, has dared to sue the National Communications Authority (NCA) for introducing a new license that allows local and smaller players into that space.
This is what a country like Ghana gets when it chooses to cede such a critical sector to a company from a country where no African business organization can ever dream of holding such a huge share of such a critical sector, much less sue a regulator for pursuing a national interest policy.
Huawei’s control of the technology support services space in Ghana cuts across all major digital public infrastructure. In fact, Huawei’s dominance of that space is so big that they even outsource jobs to local entities and pay them peanuts, while they keep the big bucks.
The NCA, under the auspices of the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization, has therefore tweaked the existing Electronic Communications Managed Services License (ECMSL) to allow local and smaller entities, other than the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Huawei and Ericsson, to take over part of the work. But Huawei, the leading OEM in the country is vehemently opposed to the new license, to the extent that it has sued the NCA, praying the Electronic Communications Tribunal to stop NCA from implementing the license as is.
The new license
The new license, dubbed the Electronic Communications Managed Service License (ECMSL), assigned levels one and two managed services to non-OEMs, while level three support services will remain with the OEMs – mainly Huawei and Ericsson.
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