SALVAGING THE PLIGHT OF TELECOM CONSUMERS
According to Wikipedia, the consumer is the one who pays to consume goods and services produced. As such, consumers play a vital role in the economic system of a nation. Simply stated, consumer is an individual that buys products or services for personal use only and not for manufacture or resale. Without the consumer’s demand or patronage, producers would lack one of the key motivations to produce. The consumer also forms strategic part of the distribution chain in the overall economy. Succinctly put, the consumer is the end of production cum distribution network; without which there cannot be producers/providers. Every buoyant economy rises and falls on the actions and reactions of the consumer.
Narrowing it down to telecommunications sector, especially as it affects Nigeria, telecom consumer is one of the major determinants propelling the growth of the telecommunication industry. With a base of over 154 million subscribers, the Nigerian consumers dominate the African telecommunication landscape. The consumers provide the revenues that Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) needed to keep moving. Yet they do not get the best satisfaction when it comes to services. In 2015, Nigerian telecom consumers coughed out a whopping $5.6 billion, which was spent on telecommunication services alone. In 2016, it was topped up by another $1 billion, making it a total of $6.6 billion.
After a long period of neglect and exploitation, finally the Nigerian telecom consumers have gotten the required recognition from the telecommunication regulatory agency—the NCC. March 15, 2017, the Nigerian Communications Commission historically declared the year 2017 as year to focus on the warfare of Nigerian subscribers. The essence of the declaration is to highlight the plight of the consumers, as regards poor quality of services being rendered to them by MNOs and proffer solutions to them. Unsolicited messages, illegal deductions from consumers’ credit, infuriating menace of robotic calls, poor quality of service, charges for unrequested services like caller tunes, call drops, unfriendly internet data plan packages, and so on have become excruciating pains and challenges on the part of subscribers.
Declaration of 2017 as year of Nigerian Telecom Consumer will go a long way to restore the confidence of the telecom subscribers in the ability of the commission to protect its rights and privileges, which is in line with the mandate of the consumer affairs bureau of the NCC, which is: “To ensure the protection of the rights, privileges and interests of telecommunications consumers, including the physically challenged groups through adequate information dissemination programmes; as well as effective policies and strategies that promote effective and qualitative telecoms service delivery.”
There is no doubt that some of the MNOs have defaulted on their primary responsibilities - to provide qualitative telecommunications services to Nigerian consumers. The poor network coverage has remained a reoccurring decimal. Even when the NCC has provided do-not-disturb (DND) code to enable consumers control the menace of unsolicited messages, by sending it to 2442, it is yet to abate. Exorbitant charges for services not rendered, or requested has been a piece of bone in the throat of telecom consumers. A situation where MNOs imposed unsolicited caller tunes on the consumers, and still deduct money from them as fees for these tunes leaves much to be desired. Inadequate telecom infrastructure, especially in the rural areas has contributed immensely to poor network coverage.
Apart from making complaints via the NCC’s designated line of 622, telecom consumers on the street want a system put in place by the NCC that automatically reverses unjustifiable deductions on their airtime, without having to embark on bureau- cratic voyage of reporting to the consumer affairs bureau of the NCC, or complaint commission. The banking sector model, where Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) immediately reverses unpaid debt alert, should be emulated in the telecommunication sector, as part of regulatory measures put in place to protect the telecom consumers.
How many telecom consumers will start calling the NCC’s complaint line 622 because their network operators short-changed them of N50, for unsolicited caller tunes? How many of the telecom consumers are observant or literate enough to know when they have been exploited? What will telecom consumer do if at the end of the month he has not been able to exhaust his one-month data plan due to poor quality of internet services, and the hosting network operator insists that he recharges his data plan before the remaining data will be rolled over, or allowed to expire with the month? What stops the network service providers from rolling over subscriptions to the next month, especially any period there is epileptic internet service? These are thought provoking questions racing through the minds of telecom consumers.