Nigeria is facing an invisible war and the weapons of the many enemies arrayed against us appear to be ranged against us on all fronts. Apart from the severe scarcity of money and the soaring prices of food and all other commodities, the one that I cannot fully understand now is the improper or epileptic functioning of the GSM. For some days now, especially if you are in the rural parts of our country, you cannot easily get a call across to a loved one, a business partner or an associate.
In the event that one eventually gets through, you will hear one kind of funny muttering that appears like children playing some pranks with each other. And when that happens, your communication fails as neither you nor the person you are calling can make a meaning out of what has transpired. The most painful of it all is that it is you the initiator of the call that bears the cost. The telecomm providers smile to the bank.
We in the neglected rural areas hear that one of our main telecomm providers has a problem with its under the sea international cables. This explanation is little consolation to anyone who cannot speak and get heard by the one he seeks to relay a message to or to converse with. You feel cheated, frustrated and dejected. Your anger is aroused that it is Mother Nigeria and no one else that is betraying you. The question you are forced to ask is: is there no one charged with the responsibility of calling these telecomm giants to order? Can no one give an order that the lines be cleared within a certain specific deadline? Can nothing be done about the situation and we Nigeria must wade through this patiently until kingdom comes?
What is really wrong that a consequential nation like this one cannot seem to get one of its acts right in a matter of a day or two if something gets wrong? Are we cursed that nothing will ever get right in our country? It really pains that utilities which citizens of some countries lower than us in all things enjoy with relative ease will become a perennial source of frustration and anger in our own country.
Ever since the emergence of the GSM in Nigeria in 2001, there is no time you can say was its good, smooth-free time. There has always been one issue or another with it; with the issue of dropped calls being the most persistent pain to communicators and no one in the leadership of our country has ever stood his grounds that the telecomm providers correct whatever is responsible or compensate callers when they encounter such an incident. I cannot remember when I have been compensated for drop calls with an unexpected credit in my phones.
The people we expect to be our defenders against the telecomm providers speak for them like their PR practitioners. You do not understand what is going on. What offense have we committed that our punishment seems unending? Now that we are in a depression, some of us expect that effort will be made to lessen our burdens but every day, our woes seem to be increasing. Proving the saying that one woes come, they come in battalions.
A friend of mine from Ukelle in Yala LGA of northern CRS, just a stone throw from my own Bekwarra LGA where I now live, lost his father and the burial took place last weekend. He related to me the enormous sufferings which sympathizers who came from Abuja, Lagos, Kaduna and other places faced in coming to that part of the state to console him on the death went through in their labour of love. Those who came from Abuja, he told me, could not pass through the normal route of Abuja, Nasarawa, and the Katsina-Ala-Ogoja-Ikom Highway, dropping at Ogoja and taking a vehicle from Ogoja to Wanakom in Ukelle because the cost has become too prohibitive because the road is so bad. They, therefore, had to pass through Makurdi-Oju LGA road in Benue and doing a part of the transiting on a motor bike ride that costs N6, 000 for a distance of about 30 kilometres! When one of them returned to Abuja, he fell seriously sick because, he said, of the motor bike ride on a bad road that twisted and turned him all along the route!
In all of this, the question is: are there some officials of state in the LGA, State or the National systems that are taking notes of some of these challenges we have that is thinking seriously of what he or she can do to alleviate the sufferings of citizens located in some remote or ‘bad’ areas of the country? Some of these terrible inconveniences look unending and the fear is that they are increasing in dimensions and complexities. Can any seer tell us what we need to do, and to do most urgently, to bring this to an end?
