Professor Ayo Olukotun in his last week column in the Punch newspapers titled ‘Consumer woes in austere times” narrated his experience while trying to renew his monthly subscription to Direct Satellite Television owned by Multichoice. At the end, he could not but ‘marvelled at how helpless consumers had become at the hands of these service providers’. Once again, I think this is one more evidence of failure of governance.
The capitalist economic system, the reigning ‘god’ worshipped by most societies holds no apologies to life being the survival of the fittest. Consequently, it allows the affluent to further impoverish the poor. This was why men traded their freedom and liberty for government’s protection of life and properties. The primary role of government therefore is to put measures in place to checks man’s greed especially in our own environment where some of our sick political leaders who according to Chinua Achebe, ‘have been in the rain for so long and swore none of their generation would go back to the rain’, steal from the poor to build mansions in which they and their children will never live over many capital cities of the world.
Our own tragedy is that not only has our government in the last 15 years totally abandoned the poor to the vagaries of economic forces and merchants of greed, government itself has been an accessory in the impoverishment of the most vulnerable. This found expressions in such self-serving government policy thrusts as PPPRA designed as an answer to a contrived fuel scarcity to pave way for the theft of N1.7trillion under fraudulent fuel subsidy deal, World Bank inspired liberalization and privatisation which did not only turn our country into importer of labour of other societies but ended with the country recouping only about $1b from $100b investments made between 1960 and 1999 and the monetization policy which led to the sharing of our inherited national patrimony in form of choice properties by those in government and their friends.
But in March 2015, Nigerians in spite of impediments put on their way by those who had levied war against them voted for change. Sadly more than one year of government of change, many are increasingly becoming disillusioned as change appears a forlorn hope. Government effort is not made any easier by the current economic reality which is partly the fallout of massive looting of the nation’s resources, sponsored sabotage of the economy by those called upon to account for their past. As if these were not enough problems, we also have an APC government where the executive seems to operate independently of the party that brought it to power, (I sometimes wonder if Tony Momoh and Segun Osoba are still in APC); a pathetic Senate passing resolution upon resolution to evade prosecution for alleged criminal offences including forgery by its leadership and a Lower House enmeshed in scandals over padding of the budget by as much as N40billion.
Four months ago, this column called attention to the creeping dictatorship in Abuja where everything seemed to begin and end on President Buhari’s table in an age when government has become a science susceptible to scientific laws. Attention was called to the over 500 ‘small governments’ the President and his party needed to effect change but controlled by those opposed to change because of huge benefits they reap from the prevailing economic anarchy.
Last week Segun Adeniyi, a former colleague at The Guardian, now of ThisDay newspapers, called our attention to President Buhari and his APC’s inability to reconstitute the statutory boards of regulatory institutions that are critical to the economy, dissolved over a year ago. He cited the following as examples the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), the Bank of Industry (BOI); the Nigeria Investment Promotion Council (NIPC); the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC); the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC); the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Commission (NDIC); the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) and the Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) among many others.
Now using NCC as a base, let me add to Professor Olukotun’s anxiety about absence of consumer’s protection, my own personal experiences which I am sure is not markedly different from those of other Nigerian victims of rip-off by unrestrained service providers. A few years back, I roamed my telephone line from one of the telecommunication giants outside the country. Four days after my departure from Nigeria, I was told I had exhausted my N50, 000 deposit. This was not so much from usage but because of endless repetition of any message sent to me from Nigeria. During the last two weeks of my trip, I dreaded even switching the phone on because the stream of endless repeated messages had become a nuisance. On my arrival, I was slammed with a non-negotiable N200, 000 bills. I finally migrated from post-paid to prepaid. But that did not end my nightmare. Bombarded daily by unsolicited messages, I decided to visit the service centre of this communication giant more than once where all I got was apologies. With a subscription base of about 214 million as at March this year, with one unsolicited message at a cost of N1.00, Nigerian subscribers are ripped off to the tune of over N200m.
A rival telecommunication giant to which I also subscribe was not different. All I got from several visits to complain about frequent disappearance of post-paid credit even when the phone was not in use was ‘android phones have in- built devices that consume credits whether the phone is utilized for internet services or not’. I think this type of rip-off is only possible in Nigeria.
A few years back, a particular service provider taking a cue from a government that in an effort to raise campaign funds for the then impending election taxed motorists N24, 000 to have their old vehicle plate numbers replaced levied its customers N19, 000 to replace their existing functioning equipment for a new equipment because it was upgrading its processes. While the battle for devaluation of naira was raging a few weeks back, I branched in their office to renew my subscription only to be told in a manner of ‘take it or leave it’ that my package had gone up from N8, 000 to N10, 000.
I did not get much joy either from a rival internet services provider to which I migrated. For instance when I went to renew my subscription after a month, I was told that N5,000 of the N7, 000 I paid was yet to be utilized but must be forfeited because I exceeded my renewal date by one day.
What became apparent from the above interactions was that my actual monthly consumption of data was probably about N2, 000 but like many helpless Nigerians, I have been consistently swindled by as much as N6, 000 monthly for the greater part of five years.
By retaining men of yesterday in their positions in PPPRA which has given no explanation as to why the price of 12kg cylinder of domestic gas or four litres of lubricants Nigerians depended on to service their cheap Chinese generators, products without much foreign content have gone up by as much as 100 percent, is partly the reason why many believe President Buhari and his APC are furiously squandering away the goodwill of Nigerians. Nigerians cannot understand why a government of change has continued to multiply their pains due to indolence and inefficiency. Theresa May if they needed to be reminded constituted her full cabinet within 24 hours of becoming Prime Minister of Britain.
Credit: Jide Oluwajuyitan