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Internet access: Licensing assignments that raise questions



Of the government's plan to award 3 licenses to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Togo, there are two licenses to be awarded in May 2017, and a curious confusion over the identification of provisional contractors. What about this hypothetical willingness of the government to promote the development of the digital economy?


"The Council instructed the Minister of Posts and Digital Economy to consider the award of three (03) new licenses to Internet service providers in Togo, by invitation to tender" The communiqué sanctioning the work of the Council of Ministers of 24 August 2016.

And the same government to announce in another press release on May 31, 2017 in a communication "relating to the process of licensing Internet service providers in accordance with the agreement given by the government to allocate two (2) New licenses in order to promote quality and competitiveness in prices for the benefit of users ".

Where is the 3rd license? No explanation in the communiqué of the Council of Ministers yesterday. And that's not all.

The same press release states that following the call for tenders dating back to October 2016, "the council gave the authorization to the Ministry of Post and Digital Economy to grant the licenses to the provisional contractors that are the Groupement TEOLIS And GVA ". A very vague wording for a state communique relating to a subject as sensitive as the award of a public contract.

Should we understand that TEOLIS is a full-fledged grouping as well as GVA? Or would they form the group in question?

Acrobatics of this kind in a government communiqué are not by chance. In 2012, Faure Gnassingbe and his government met on the same subject. They analyzed the market and promised the Togolese, a third mobile phone operator. Cina Lawson will appear years later (in 2016 at Radisson Blue 2 February in Lomé) to argue that the Togolese market was too small to accommodate a new mobile phone operator.

It is now the turn of the same micmacs about the internet. First, 3 Internet service providers are announced, then 2 will be temporarily retained, then we come to present the "TEOLIS and GVA grouping" for 2 licenses to be awarded?

Moreover, GVA (Group Vivendi Africa) is a subsidiary of the Bolloré group, which already has the ambition to keep its monopoly on the Internet market in Africa, with markets in Gabon and neighboring Benin. Still the Bolloré Group, will say the other.

However, TEOLIS seems curiously to be a French company, which has since been canceled, and which would never have been involved in the provision of Internet access, but rather in the wholesale trade, of computers, peripheral and Software.

It already smells like a state scam in this new project.

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