Like nearly everyone else in Nigeria, I am not excited at having to pay 50% more to make phone calls, send text messages or use data to browse the net, receive and send emails or chat on WhatsApp, any more than I was happy in the past year to pay more for yams, potatoes, rice, meat, milk, NEPA Band B rates, school fees and hospital charges. Luckily with respect to telecoms, I make scant use of Facebook; I have never been on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat or LinkedIn; I rarely go on YouTube; my Twitter account is dormant; I check my Telegram account about once a month, and I have not opened my WeChat account for five years. According to my phone’s data, I receive more phone calls than I make and I receive more text messages than I send, so other people mostly pay for my communication.
In the wake of the announcement by the Nigeria Communications Commission [NCC] last Monday that it had approved a cap of 50% hike in telecom tariffs, I read about many howls of protest. National Association of Nigerian Students [NANS] called the tariff hikes “inconsiderate and unjustifiable” and threatened mass protests. National Association of Telecoms Subscribers [NATCOMS] also rejected the hike, saying, “It is too much for subscribers to bear. Already, we are grappling with a lot of challenges in the current business climate—fuel costs, electricity costs and more.” Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project [SERAP] filed a lawsuit, saying the tariff hike violated the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018, the 1999 Constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, “which guarantee equal access to communication services.”
Nigeria Labour Congress President Joe Ajaero described the hike as “an unjust burden on citizens already grappling with economic challenges.” He condemned the timing of the hike, saying it coincides with rising inflation and declining purchasing power of citizens. Nigerians, he said, should reject the tariff hike and prepare for collective action, including the possibility of a mass boycott of telecom services, to compel a reversal of the increase.
Boycott telecom services? If ever there is such a thing as counterproductive, I think this suggestion is it. Ok, if I refuse to make a phone call, send a text message or chat on WhatsApp even for one day, imagine what it will cost me. Instead of sending a N6 text message to pass a message to a colleague, I must hop into a car and go looking for him, at current fuel prices. I will not be able to call any clients, customers or news sources but must go looking for them wherever they are, which will cost me much more than this tariff hike. I cannot send or receive money from my arm chair; I must lift myself up and go to a bank, a very stressful prospect.
Oga Ajaero knows this, because he said, “Telecommunication services are essential for daily communication, work and access to information.” How can such a thing come cheap? Even things that are much less essential than that, have undergone steep price hikes in the past year and a half. Ajaero’s main reason is that “an average Nigerian worker already spends approximately 10 percent of their wages on telecom charges. For a worker earning the current minimum wage of N70,000, this means an increase from N7,000 to a staggering N10,500 per month or 15 percent of his salary, a cost that is unsustainable.”
Another way to look at it is, how much will such a worker be spending if there are no telecom services? He or she will probably have to spend ten times as much on transport in order to carry out office assignments, check the price of items, check about the health of a sick relative, or go to a friend’s house several times, only to find that he or she is not there, what in Nigeria we call, “I met your absence.” Mail order delivery will collapse and tens of thousands of POS operators will go hungry that day.
Age has to do with some of this perception. Mobile phones arrived in Lagos and Abuja in August 2001, and then slowly spread to other areas. Internet service arrived here only a few years earlier. To take only two pre-telecom age examples, I know a person who was sent from Sokoto to Kaduna to inform a man that his wife had delivered. These days, within minutes of a child’s delivery, we see a video of him or her on WhatsApp. In the pre-mobile telecom age, one could only withdraw money from the very bank branch where he opened the account. No wonder armed robbery has nearly died out in Nigeria because people don’t carry so much money around anymore. And also because armed robbers can hardly lay siege on a house for many hours these days, because all the neighbours have mobile phones and will quickly call for help. The flip side of it is that mobile phones enabled kidnapping. Without them, how can you kidnap a person on the highway, contact the family, negotiate for ransom payment and arrange a precise drop point? Nigeria’s N2.2 trillion kidnap industry will be hit hard by Ajaero’s telecom boycott threat.
Telcom’s “corporate fat cats,” as Ajaero called them, must be wondering why NLC did not organize a boycott of food stores and of stalls selling consumables, vegetables, meat, fish and eggs when, in the past year, they increased their prices three or four-fold. Is it because telecom is more essential than rice, Milo, sugar, milk or meat? I don’t think so because one will not die because he didn’t make a phone call, but he will perish within days if he does not eat food. So, when traders of food products were hiking prices, why didn’t we boycott them and their products? Afterall, their hikes were much more than the 50% telecom tariff hike and their products are more essential to our survival than telecom. The simple answer must be, no one can control all traders. Although the government is supposed to have a price control agency, it cannot really tell traders not to increase their prices, since they too were responding to increases in fuel and dollar prices for which the government is more responsible than they are. Why haven’t we boycotted rented apartments, since landlords all over Nigeria hiked their rents in the past 18 months for even the most decrepit houses, saying it is their own source of income and they must adjust rates in order to cope with hikes in nearly all other spheres of life?
Ok, maybe NLC does not worry itself about private schools, which have also increased their fees phenomenally in the current academic session. NLC’s view could be that anyone who sends his children to a private school must be a corporate, public service, business or criminal fat cat who does not deserve its sympathy. As far as the average citizen sees it, the people who send their children to private schools are the very ones who conspired, through neglect and corruption, to destroy the public school system, and then send their children to privileged schools in order to give them a head start over the kids of poor citizens in the next generation. Hence, NLC will never call for a boycott of private schools even if they hike their fees by 10,000 percent and introduce as many extra levies as they can think of.
Probably the same thinking applies to private clinics. They, too, have been hiking their fees by leaps and bounds, claiming that they are trying to cope with rising prices of their inputs. Actually, pharmacies have hiked their drug prices much more than private clinics. Imagine, a month’s supply of a diabetic drug that I used to buy for N9,000 less than two years ago now costs N55,000. No one organized a boycott of the pharmacies. They too brought the drugs in from India, China and elsewhere. Since the dollar exchange rate is beyond their control, we hapless diabetics must be the ones to bear the cost.
The fact that NCC has to approve a telecom tariff hike is one of the problematic aspects of the telecom sector reform laws. It is true that all over the world, critical utility tariffs are subject to some regulation. In Nigeria however we tend to overdo it, which was how we killed the old public corporations such as NEPA, Post Office, P&T and the water corporations. I remember an NTA Network News story one day in the 1980s, saying Federal Executive Council did not approve a Post Office request to increase the cost of postage stamps. The Postmaster General complained that the cost had not increased in ten years despite rising costs of distribution vehicles and fuel. May be that was ok because government gave subventions to the Post Office and other utilities. But since government obviously gives no subventions now to MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9Mobile, holding them down like it used to do to the old service providers is ruinous.
Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s [FCCPC] take on this matter however appeared to me to be the sensible one, everything considered. It said given the recent tariff hike, telcos should improve their service quality delivery so that “Issues such as network congestion, dropped calls, inconsistent internet speeds, unusual data depletion and poor customer service” should be a General Buratai-style “thing of the past.”
This is the old chicken and egg problem. Nigerian telecom customers regularly complain about network congestion, poor interconnectivity, dropped calls and slow internet speed. The telecom giants’ view is that they can ameliorate these problems if they have enough money to procure and install the latest tech tools, expand their base stations and maintain them profitably, but consumers might not want to pay for that. Which one should come first, improving telecom services or paying for it to get the right tools? It is the same problem in the power industry. Citizens complain about Discos’ bills but far too many citizens, and even private and public institutions, are reluctant to pay their bills for power supply. You often hear people saying, “We will pay if there is improved power supply.” If you didn’t pay for poor supply, what is the guarantee that you will be willing to pay for an improved supply, which will cost much more?
