Ex-LTA Commissioner Waritay weighs in On Ongoing LTA Saga

A former Commissioner of the Liberia Telecommunications Authority (LTA), who played a pivotal role in establishing the regulatory body in 2007 and helped with the drafting of the Act that created the LTA, Prof. Lamini A. Waritay, says the beleaguered and now suspended Liberia Telecommunications Authority (LTA) commissioners should have “negotiated their way out” of the board with the Chief Executive, after it had become clear the new national leadership is determined to reconstitute the board.

The ex-commissioner contends that “Given all the circumstances that the board is currently caught in, such a non-litigation approach would have spared everybody concerned “unnecessary headache and pressure”, secure jobs for “some of the out-of-favor commissioners in other sectors, and perhaps earn some of them a reasonable severance package,” even though he points out that successive LTA boards to date have never made any such severance gesture toward him and Commissioner Abdulai Kamara when their own tenures were cut short by the Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf Administration in 2013.

The former Commissioner says he is advising suspended commissioners this way because “at the end of the day, if a President, who is the head of the Executive Branch, is determined to see the back of the commissioners, for whatever reason or reasons, he is effectively saying ‘I am not ready and willing to work with you commissioners any longer, because I don’t trust you guys or I no longer have confidence in your ability to regulate the sector., or you have been politically partisan in your posture.’” Such a situation, argues Waritay, may not necessarily mean the executive’ action is legal, “but it creates a negative environment in which the commissioners will find it difficult to effectively carry out their fiduciary responsibilities to the sector and the government.”

With the “prevailing poisoned relationship between the executive and the board,” Waritay noted, “it is hard to see how the LTA (despite its autonomous character as reflected in the Telecommunications Act of 2007) will continue to be a viable regulatory force in the absence of the support and blessing of an executive branch that must approve the LTA budget before the entity operationalizes it, that has sway over the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications as the policy driver of the telecom sector, and whose executive support is often necessary and vital if the LTA is to be effective in carrying out its regulatory responsibilities—especially in dealing with deep-pocketed and sometimes uncooperative telecom operators/and service providers.”

“Whatever the outcome of the ongoing actions, and never mind the merits or otherwise of the tenure dispute,” Waritay thinks “the suspended commissioners have been somewhat weakened and potentially rendered ineffectual in the eyes of the service providers they are supposed to be regulating, adding: “The executive’s latest implied allegation of possible impropriety against the commissioners makes the situation even more unsustainable for the suspended board.”

Prof. Waritay acknowledges that the current situation could have been avoided if the executive branch also had more carefully thought through the tenure situation and obtained the appropriate regulatory advice before making any move, noting that “There are many ways to kill a cat,” adding: ‘If you want to kill a dog, first give it a bad name.” He pointed out that it was that kind of strategy that ex-President Sirleaf used to set a precedent of tinkering with the tenure situation at the LTA in 2009, when “she sought to reconstitute the existing board by blaming all the five commissioners for the infighting at the LTA, which was in reality the result of the corrupt and dictatorial actions of only one commissioner—the Chairperson at the time.”

Providing a brief historic background for the setting up of the LTA, the former LTA commissioner reveals that when he and Dr. Abdulai Vandi were trying to set up the LTA between 2006 to 2007, with support and advice from the World Bank, “Madam President graciously gave me much needed latitude to insert certain clauses in the draft LTA Act the World bank was helping us with in order to strengthen the infant regulator and enhance its independence and effectiveness from the get-go.”

Waritay recalled that “Going by best telecom regulatory practice at the time, which had required the separation of regulatory responsibilities from the overall functions and responsibilities of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (leaving the Ministry with only policy tasks), he (Waritay) did not hesitate to suggest and insert content that he thought “would help the young regulator to sanitize and stabilize a Liberian telecom sector that was then laboring under chaotic sector circumstances, thereby compelling the Gyude Bryant transitional administration to approach the World Bank to do a desk study on the sector.”

The former Minister noted that “this was a time when many other African countries had already begun to undertake much needed telecom sector reforms—which not only helped to attract huge private investments in the sector with the attendant significant revenue generation for the governments concerned, but also facilitated the introduction of modern and efficient telecommunications innovations (both in terms of Policy and Technology) that were defining the evolving global telecommunications architecture.”

Prof. Waritay said “it was against this context, plus the prevailing best regulatory practice at the time, that the issues of tenure and the imperative of giving quasi-judicial and autonomous status to the LTA were factored into the draft legislation on the LTA.” He explained that contrary to some misconceptions by some commentators, the LTA board is an “operational” or “working board,” unlike other boards overseeing other entities of government, such as that of LPRC. “The LTA board,” the ex-commissioner emphasized, “is one where all the five commissioners work full time,” a situation which, he opined, “is necessitated by the highly multifaceted technical, regulatory, and administrative nature of the telecom sector anywhere—much like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States.

The ex-commissioner hopes the caretaker board will “move expeditiously to stabilize the situation, and by doing so, prevent any major harm to the crucial telecom sector of the country, which is still struggling to fulfill some of its core policy and regulatory imperatives, namely, ‘Universal Access’, ‘Bridging the enduring Digital Divide’, and achieving optimum ‘Quality of Service’ (QOS) and or Connectivity.”