The director of Mozambique’s National Communications Institute (INCM), Constâncio Trigo, said on Wednesday 26 June that in recent years, after several natural disasters, the institution has focused on creating regulatory and tax facilities for operators to restore telecommunications.
“On our side, as regulators, what we have done in the case of telecommunications infrastructures that have been badly affected is to create all kinds of facilities so that operators can quickly recover these infrastructures and restore communications,” the INCM’s executive director told Lusa .
He was speaking on the sidelines of the 14th Communications Forum of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP), being held at the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation in Porto, Portugal.
“These actions have included, for example, exemption from paying radio fees for a certain period, precisely so that they can finance the recovery of lost infrastructure,” he said.
On the government side, the source said that “there has been a lot of support in facilitating the import of telecommunications equipment, and for the replacement of all the investment that has been lost due to natural disasters”.
“The role of both the government and the regulator is to create a process of facilitation so that operators can return to investing and operating,” he pointed out, emphasising that with time, companies will recover the investment they make.
Asked about creating resilience to deal with possible aggressive weather phenomena in the future, Constâncio Trigo said that “a lot of work has been done”, especially in organisational terms. “We’ve been learning a lot because we’ve suffered a lot,” he emphasised.
At the time, he pointed to progress such as the licensing of the Starlink operator, which uses satellites for communications.
