Naija – Calling with tears

In life if you learning to adapt, is learning to survive, resisting usually leads to extinction. If you or your buddy works at a business centre, you will know what I mean.
On the other hand, if you have lost hard-earned or even looted money to 419, you may be forgiven for cursing Yahoo. Since most of your prayers are still on heaven’s voicemail; chances are your curses would end up in heaven’s trashcan. The reason is simple, when God gave you brain, he intended for you to use it. That means knowing that if it’s too sweet to be true, it’s usually a fluke. But if your major pre-occupation is ‘to hammer’ and leave the rest of us on the scrounging lane, you would invest in anything, even a white lie in the hope that it all turns real.
So it is with the GSM, which someone aptly described as General Societal Madness. Everybody carries a gadget these days and there is an unending quest to be the first to spot the latest, even at the risk of having your finger or arm cut off by desperate phone thieves who harvest them at any cost. Cell phones have shrunk distances, provided employment for some and a veritable alibi for those with inquisitive wives. The big babes who date ten guys use it when they’re flying to London with a Lagos or Abuja bound ABC Transport night bus if you eavesdrop on conversations.
In Naija, someone between the Wizard of Ota and General Abdulsalami, aka Father Christmas – (not for his generosity but his grey beard!) broke that monopoly that Nitel had on us forever and we are grateful. Unfortunately, phone companies are no better than Yahoo boys. They make sweet promises and deliver crappy service. It’s almost fifteen years since we have been clutching two, three or four phones and making money for the inventive Chinese multi-sim scammers but with little or no service. Like the Americans, the Chinese want our money and our goods, but not our Ebola.
Phone companies make you happy and sad. You are happy to be rid of Nitel and join the trend but you still carry four phones of different brands with no call guarantees. When you do get through it may not be to the desired number. That you hit the right number gives you no guarantees of a meaningful conversation because you may be cut off before you have the guarantee of completing it.
Phone companies claim to spend money running base stations than Naija did sending satellites into orbit with similar effect. They were offered five years of tax-free holidays but what do they give in return – Yahooze services, such as one car gift for a billion recharge cards and the like. Not everybody wants to win SUVs, what they desire is just to talk or surf the net – services they’ve paid for?
For all our advertisement of a rebased economy and all its unique potentials, Naija communication customers have entered one chance bus when being called from anywhere outside our shores. You could dial Cotonou from anywhere and be connected in seconds with a dialing tone but dial the sleeping giant of Africa and listen to the drama. You’re put on hold, then fed on a nauseating diet of noisy commercials – from loud music to annoying ringtones. Visiting home, you’re inundated with unsolicited SMS that are not public service memos. Wait for it you are charged for them. Call and asked to be taken off and you’re put on hold, your money wasted. The assurances you get amount to political promises.
We are the joke of nations. A rebased economy needs foreign investment. Foreign investors have no patience in abundance. Fancy Warren Buffet or Donald Trump on a Naija line being told ‘the customer you’re calling cannot be reached right now, please try again later’. Investors want efficiency and finesse; attributes that Naija GSM operators have heard of, but have no use of.
The guys at the NCC live in a reasonproof glass house. They see no evil, hear no evil and certainly never speak ill of the companies they are supposed to regulate. Their workers are among the most travelled evil servants in the shitstem; they travel but never learn. If they do, they should have found many things wrong and fixed it, not Servicom style. There used to be a communication ministry back in the day. They were supposed to look into these things. Communication companies and their supervisos are like the deaf supervising the dumb without sign language. We should occupy their offices and drill some sense into them.