The Senate Committee on Communication Technology has assured that the upper house would give NIPOST’s infrastructure development bill an accelerated hearing to enable the organisation perform optimally.

The Committee, led by Sen. Gilbert Nnaji, gave the assurance recently in Abuja while on an oversight visit to the NIPOST headquarters.

Nnaji pointed out that the Senate would be taking such a step because it believed the importance of NIPOST to national development should not be de-emphasised. “It is the role of the Senate Committee to look into all the agencies under the Ministry of Communication Technology and contribute to the successful attainment of the goals of the service,’’ he said.

The senator said a lot of investment was needed in developing NIPOST to be a postal service of international standard and repute.

“We would do everything that is legislatively possible for us to help make sure you realise your set goals in NIPOST. We will give the Postal Bill, which you have told us about, a speedy passage once it comes to the National Assembly, because it would help this agency and the whole nation,’’ Nnaji said.

Earlier, the Postmaster-General, Malam Ibrahim Mori-Baba, had said the Postal Bill was aimed at attracting more attention to NIPOST. He said the attention would bein terms of funding, remodelling its infrastructure and providing financial, digital and social inclusion of the excluded areas.

Mori-Baba said NIPOST currently has a network of 1,065 post offices and more than 3,000 additional postal agencies distributed nationwide in 537 of the 774 local government areas in the country. “We therefore call for the provision of post offices in the areas that are excluded as 237 local governments do not have post offices. “In addition, we will want to do something about the poor state of the existing post offices, because they are not in good shape due to inadequate funds,’’ he said.

Mori-Baba also called for the provision of post offices in all the airports in Nigeria as well as standard shopping malls so that posting could be made a lot easier. He pointed out that a major challenge faced by the service was the issue of addresses on streets as well as house numbering. “Many streets and houses have no addresses, thus making it impossible for NIPOST to reach them,’’ the Postmaster-General said.

He called for a joint collaboration between NIPOST and governments at the local level to tackle the challenge so that Nigerians can easily use their house addresses to receive mails.

Mori-Baba also called for the establishment of a regulatory agency for NIPOST, as the postal service could not function effectively as its own regulator.