INTRODUCTION We are witnesses in this age to the realization of the global village. Numerous communication networks are making distance, and consequently, boundaries of ethnicity, cultural diversity, and indeed, national sovereignty, matters of reduced significance. Consequently, this is a time of great importance for those who are concerned about the relationship between the emerging forces of liberalized telecommunications and the values of society. Around the world today, liberalization has become the dominant trend in telecommunications policy. It may help at this point, though, to define what we mean by this concept. At the risk of oversimplification, liberalization means, as a former American President Ronald Reagan said, “the unleashing of the magic of the marketplace” (Lenert 1998: 3). The hallmark of a policy of liberalization is a relatively easy-to-understand focus on achieving competition geared to moving information as quickly and inexpensively as possible. A programme of deregulation and laissez faire usually accompanies this. In Nigeria today, the telecommunications environment has been deregulated, allowing private companies like Vmobile (Celtel, Zain), MTN and Globacom to provide mobile telephone services to Nigerians through the Global System of Mobile Telecommunications (GSM). Where the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) © Kamla-Raj 2011 J Soc Sci, 26(3): 211-216 (2011) Liberalizing Telecommunication in Nigeria: Argument for a Democratic Model Essienubong H. Ikpe* and Nsikak S. Idiong** Department of Communication Arts, University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria E-mail: *<dr_ikpe@yahoo.com>, **<nsi-nsing@yahoo.com> KEYWORDS Deregulation. Democratization. Participation. Equality and Free Access. Democracy ABSTRACT In this discussion, we assess the liberalized telecommunication sector in Nigeria against the backdrop of the social and economic realities of a developing society such as ours. In doing so, we demonstrate that the contemporary telecommunication policy in Nigeria is based on a transmission model of communication, a situation which has several negative socio-economic implications, chief among which are economic disempowerment and social exclusion. In the alternative, we advocate a different model for telecommunication policy-making. Such recourse, we argue, can lead to greater democratization of telecommunication and satisfy the communal, cultural and ritual exigencies which Carey’s model expects communication policy to satisfy. The model being proposed here is the community - cultural - ritual model of democratic telecommunications. Such an approach is also in keeping with the emancipatory theory of media. It is expected that a recourse to this model will safeguard the participation of all sectors of the society whether rich or poor, majority or minority. held monopolistic sway, private enterprises are free to provide competitive services. In bro- adcasting, this trend has been replicated in the licensing of private broadcast operators, both those operating terrestrial transmission states and those providing satellite-based broadcasting services. In this paper, however, our focus shall be on the liberalization of public telephony in Nigeria and how this affects socio-economic development, particularly in the rural areas. The goal of telecommunications liberalization regimes all over the world is to “harness maximum public good from free markets and global competition” (Lenert 1998: 10). However, the so- called ‘universal service” provided by private telecommunications operators has been shown to reflect an imbalance in the allocation of communication resources, through the action of market mechanisms which are “naturally skewed in favour of the higher income-earning classes of society” (Barber 1995: 237). The question then revolves around the extent to which economic exigencies must be balanced against social objectives of inclusion and equality of opportunity (Dordick 1995). When this ques- tion is considered, democratization becomes an urgent alternative to the present liberalization craze. As a process, UNESCO (1981: 166) ope- rationalizes democratization as the process whereby: (a) the individual becomes an active partner and not a mere object of communication,