NITEL

Nigerian Telecommunications Limited, or NITEL, was the principal telecommunications company in Nigeria, and was owned by the government of Nigeria until it was sold to Mtel by the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE). The mobile telecommunications arm of Nitel is responsible for all wired telecommunications in Nigeria.

Looking from 1958 to the arrival of Global Satellite system communication (GSM) in Nigeria; NITEL was able to provide 450,000 subscriber lines for a population of 120 million.

In February 2008 a report by BBC News said that the Nigerian government assumed the transnational corporation did not improve performance of NITEL and therefore stopped privatization in favour of Transcorp. In 2015, the government eventually finalized a transaction that saw NITEL and Mtel's assets to NATCOM. The deal was valued at $252 million.

Another Nigeria Telecom Company (Ntel) was launched In April which took the place of Nitel, Ntel is the newest reincarnation of the now defunct telecoms company, NITEL. The Nigerian government handed over NITEL/Mtel assets over to NATCOM (Ntel’s parent company) in a deal worth $252 million last year. Before that, there had been many attempts to resurrect or offload Nigeria’s principal telecommunications company, and they all fell through. Because of all that drama, there’s been more than a little skepticism in the air about whether NATCOM can turn around the curse that appears to have plagued the NITEL assets they’ve bought over.