ZTE provides $82,251,950 supplier credit for Phase 1 of the National Rural Telephony Project (NRPT) (Linked to Record ID#73339)

Project narrative

On July 5, 2002, ZTE signed an $82,251,950 supplier credit agreement with the Government of Nigeria for Phase 1 of the National Rural Telephony Project (NRPT). This loan carried the following terms: 12 year maturity, 6 year grace period, and a 3.5% interest rate. The final maturity date of the loan was December 31, 2014, and according to the Government of Nigeria’s Debt Management Office (DMO), the loan was fully repaid by the end of 2014. In order to finance its supplier credit agreement with the Government of Nigeria, ZTE secured an export seller’s credit from China Eximbank. The purpose of this project was to provide telecommunication (including phone, fax, and internet) services to 218 of the country’s 774 Local Government Areas (LGAs) and Federal Capital Territory and install 150,226 Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) lines. ZTE was the contractor responsible for implementation and this project was plagued by problems and controversies. As of 2011, the project had still not successfully installed a single CDMA line. Then, in 2012, a top official of Nigeria’s Ministry of Communications Technology announced that “[t]he telecom industry is fully liberalised, there is very little government involvement and, therefore, we believe that the National Rural Telephony Project is better implemented and managed outside of government. So these six rural telephony exchanges are being concessioned to companies that have paid for them and our role is to monitor the implementation and delivery of services to rural areas. In a sense, we are getting out of the rural telephony.”