He sounded distraught as he narrated his displeasure to our correspondent that morning.
Mr. Adeyemi Linus, a peasant farmer in Bayeku, an agrarian community in Ibadan, Oyo State, woke up that morning to realise it was his grandson’s birthday. Hoping to be one of the first people to wish the 17-year-old a happy birthday, Linus grabbed his phone to check how much airtime he had as he rose slowly from bed.
With a balance of N26.58k on his phone, he pulled out the N500 he had tucked under his pillow the previous night, grabbed the closest of his shirts and rushed out into the street to buy airtime so he could share the “joy of the special day” with his “adorable” grandchild, before going to the farm.
Linus bought N400 MTN recharge card, hoping it would enable him to make his call and still have a little left to make a few other calls. Anticipating an exciting conversation with his grandson as he made his way back to his house, he whistled as he loaded the card. Time check was 8:30am.
Just as he settled into the sofa in front of his house to initiate the call, he received four messages consecutively. He told our correspondent that he almost ignored the messages because he was in a hurry to make the call but that he grudgingly clicked on the first message, which left him deflated afterwards.
He recalled, “I was shocked to see that N200 had been deducted from my airtime as subscription fees for some services that I never subscribed to. It was as if I was dreaming because I did not subscribe to anything. All I do with the phone is to make calls and read messages, most of which are from MTN without my asking for them. I had noticed similar deductions from my airtime in the past and that was why I rarely recharge the phone because they bill me for several things that I don’t know about.
“Each of the four messages cost N50 so I lost N200 just like that. The first message gave me health tips, the second one gave me reasons why I should do exercise; the third one said my caller tune had been renewed and the fourth was about ‘tips to make money from the comfort of your home,’ and I never applied or subscribed to any of them.
“I had called the customer care many times but they kept assuring me they had deactivated it, yet they kept billing me.”
Apparently confused about the development, Linus recalled that he read the messages several times, hoping he received them in error and his money would be returned. But just as he was slowly reconciling himself with the “strange billing” and made to “quickly make the call before they removed the remaining,” another message came in, saying his monthly subscription for “twitter goodie bag had successfully been renewed at N100.”
“At that juncture, I felt like throwing the phone away. My dear friend, I never subscribed to anything and I wonder why MTN should do that. I had to quickly switch off my phone and remove the battery so I could save the remaining amount.
“Fortunately, moments later, I switched it on and I quickly called the boy. I spoke for about four minutes 35 seconds when I heard “one minute remaining.” I thank God that they even allowed me to make the call, even though it was shorter than I planned. By the time I finished, I had N2.56k. I was angry but there was nothing I could do. These days, I only recharge when I need to make call.”
Some subscriber at one of the telecoms operators’ customer care centre in Garki, Abuja
Linus’ experience might sound strange but such is the reality of many mobile telecoms subscribers in Nigeria today, whereby mobile telecom operators, including Glo, MTN, Etisalat and Airtel charge them for services they never subscribed to.
Many mobile phone users who spoke to Saturday PUNCH lamented that they had been surcharged by their network providers, usually for things they knew nothing about. They explained that even though the introduction of GSM service in the country has been a blessing, they have equally had bitter experiences that had almost robbed them of the joy that it brought them initially.
Telecoms in Nigeria, a bitter-sweet experience
When the Global System for Mobile communication was introduced in Nigeria in 2001, the joy and excitement that greeted its arrival was historic and unequalled. It was like a breakthrough from the primitive days, when people went through harrowing experiences before they could make use of telephone services.
Then, people largely made use of rechargeable NITEL card and they had to visit telephone booths to make calls, and some of the few subscribers observed that what was obtainable then was a system characterised by frustration, pronounced dissatisfaction and poor service delivery. But since the introduction of the GSM, efficiency and comfort became affordable.
Therefore, in the opinion of many, the advent of GSM did not only sweeten communication experience, it was like a migration from an old order, more so that shortly after the commencement of GSM services, the arrival of Econet Nigeria (now Airtel) and MTN in the same 2001 and Glo’s entry in 2003 made the experience a sweet one. The advent of smartphones also gave Nigerians more reasons to appreciate the development some more.
But few years down the line, many subscribers describe their experience with their network providers as frustrating and one plagued with a mix of instantaneous joy and remarkable sadness. Impliedly, the pleasant experience people once had has been taking a sharp descent for the worse.
They noted that apart from the declining quality of service and the frustration that often accompanies it, most of the network service providers had devised ways of cheating them. These, consumers said, range from unsolicited ringback tunes and tips on various subjects, monthly deductions for subscriptions they never initiated, news alerts to undelivered SMS without refund and sometimes promo offers.
They said even when they complain, the usual response they often get from the customer care of the respective network providers is ‘system error’ while they (consumers) kept losing money. According to some consumers, even when they send the stipulated command to end a service or they complain to the customer care officers of the affected operator, they would be assured that the problem had been resolved while it persists.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why Akinyemi Janet had yet to forgive MTN for debiting her of N8,000 when she travelled to the United States on a short visit few weeks ago. She recalled that before she left the country, she recharged her phone to the tune of N8,000 so as to have something to rely on in case of emergency.
But shortly after her arrival at the airport, she said she saw a brief message on her phone that N1,500 had been deducted from her account but that before she could read the message it had disappeared. “After a 12-hour flight, I was too tired to check it or bother myself about it. I thought it might have something to do with the change of environment,” she said.
Janet, who had been strained by the jet lag, sprang to life when she tried to call her parents back home and she was told she didn’t have sufficient credit to make a call. She continued, “Initially, I felt it was bad network, so I kept trying. Since the response persisted, I checked my balance to see what was happening. To my greatest surprise, my credit balance was N0.02k. I screamed!
“I knew it couldn’t be real, so I switched off the phone to see if it would come back, but it never came back. To avoid a repeat of same, I refused to recharge my phone until I came back.”
Out of anger, Janet said one of the first calls she made on arriving Nigeria was to the customer care and that she was told that the money was for her internet connection.
She continued, “Before I left Nigeria, I subscribed to the normal N1,000 Blackberry Internet Service on my Blackberry and they never touched my airtime. But when I got the US, they left my data and started deducting from my airtime. And interestingly, I wasn’t even browsing when they deducted the money. Even if I was browsing, do they charge N500 per kilobyte for me to have exhausted N8,000 within five minutes. Till date that money is gone and they expect me to forget about it.
“As if that was not enough, my Airtel SIM did the same thing the day I came back. I bought a new smartphone and inserted the SIM. I recharged with N2,000 airtime, hoping to subscribe for data the following day, but before the next morning, everything was gone. When I called the customer care line, I was told that since I didn’t subscribe for data, they had to deduct from my airtime, even when I didn’t browse or download anything. Since then, I have not recharged the line and that is the way it will be.”
Like Janet, Chika Ezeobi is definitely not happy with his network provider, MTN, at the moment. He told
Saturday PUNCH that following the company’s promo, called ‘cash quest promo’ for which subscribers were charged N100 daily with the promise that they could win cash prize, a sport utility vehicle or electronics, he had been very angry with his network provider.
Ezeobi, a student who was hoping to hit a jackpot through his daily subscription, said having done the subscription for a number of weeks, he had to visit the closest customer care office to find out the date of the draw.
A distressed Ezeobi said he was shocked beyond words when a customer care officer at a retail centre told him the programme had ended since August 8, while his money was still being deducted in November.
He said, “I was shocked and disappointed on hearing that because it was fraudulent. If the promo had ended, why were they still deducting my money? The person who attended to me said I should have been following the promo to know when it ended. And I wondered if it was not left to them to discontinue the deductions when it ended.
“When I called the customer care line, the person who spoke to me apologised. I asked if my money would be refunded, he said MTN wouldn’t be able to do so because it was a system error. I felt scandalised and till date, I lost thousands of naira to them. If you multiply that by the number of persons that could have suffered the same fate, it could be running into millions. That is not fair.”
Unlike Ezeobi who actually subscribed to the service for which he was being charged, Kingsley said he had never subscribed to caller tunes on his Glo network, yet he has a fuji song as his ringback tune for which N50 is deducted from his account every month.
Like Kingsley, another angry subscriber, Desmond, is yet to forgive Airtel and Glo for the amount of money he said he had lost to the “sharp practices” of the operators. He noted that apart from relationship tips and news update from CNN, he had been forced to pay N100 monthly to renew Twitter Goodie Bag that he never subscribed to. He added that in spite of the repeated calls to the customer care and the assurance that it had been cancelled, Glo kept deducting the N100 till two years after.
“The deduction started in April, 2013 and immediately I complained to the customer care portal they gave me a code to send. I must have sent that code for about 1,000 times but it never stopped. I went to their outlet, they promised to stop it but they didn’t, until September 2015.
“They also send me relationship tips, CNN news update, all at a cost to me. Painfully, when you tell them to stop it, they won’t even if they promise to.” The myriad of complaints from subscribers can be overwhelming. Some lamented that after exhausting their browsing data, the operators, without notifying them, start deducting from their airtime. Desmond is also not happy that his N50 is being deducted for relationship tips every two weeks by Airtel. “I even bought an Etisalat line, hoping it would be free from these illegal deductions, but they are all the same. Eventually, I have had to drop the two other lines to endure MTN’s service. They are all the same, and it is so painful,” he added.
Findings showed that many subscribers have had to buy more than one SIM card from different operators to reduce their losses and with the hope of getting an improved service from another if one was deficient.
Since Moyin Akinbami travelled to the United Kingdom sometime last year, she said Glo had been deducting an unspecified amount from her airtime when she did not subscribe to any service. She said, “The Mumu Comic Service is against my wish and it is distributed under the 55501 portal. It can be up to five times a day, starting from 12 midnight, and Glo has refused to unsubscribe me from the service. I keep my Glo line alive by having airtime sent to me on a regular basis, but Glo systematically drains everything through unsolicited messages, spurious calls and many others. Does the NCC still think it’s only MTN that deserves a fine?”
Beyond the “illegal” deduction of subscribers’ airtime, other complaints lodged by the subscribers include unsolicited messages and unwanted calls from the networks, such as 55990 or 7571 for Glo, 08034100 or 0757 for MTN, 08090334069 for Etisalat, 39922227 for Airtel, etc, call jam or interruption, delay in connection, false messages, among others.
Telecoms, a growing initiative
Between July 2014 and September 2015, the number of active lines, including mobile and Code Division Multiple Access, known as CDMAs in the country has risen from 132,186, 840 to 150,660,631 out of a population of about 170 million Nigerians.
As of September 2015, MTN has 62,493,732 subscribers (representing 2.1 per cent increase since the third quarter of 2014), Globacom has 31,306,472 (representing 4.81 per cent increase within the same period), Airtel has 31,134,625 (representing 4.08 per cent increase within the same period) while Etisalat has 23,492,214 (representing 5.36 per cent increase within the same period).
Furthermore, the number of telephone subscribers per 100 individuals living within an area (Teledensity) passed 100 per cent for the first time to stand at 103.9 per cent, which points to the fact that more Nigerians are embracing the use of mobile phones. This is even more so, going by the information that Nigerians spend about N212bn monthly on internet subscriptions while the country’s telecom revenue is also estimated to have surpassed $20bn in 2015.
Given that the average revenue per user is $6 at N196.79 to a dollar, this gives N1,181.82 as the ARPU monthly. When this is multiplied by the number of 150,660,631 active users as of September 2015, according to NCC, the amount spent on airtime monthly by active subscribers in Nigeria is given as N178bn monthly. Thus, given the many ways operators surcharge their subscribers, a part of this might account for the over $20bn recorded by the industry in 2015.
An evaluation by Wikipedia in 2014 had shown that Nigeria ranks as the seventh country in the world with the highest number of mobile phones in use, with about 167,371,945 mobile phones and over 90 million internet users.
An expert in Information Technology, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, averred that given the barrage of complaints from many of these subscribers, there are indications that many subscribers are dissatisfied with their network providers, most of whom, he said, appear to have benefitted from unduly surcharging their customers.
He noted that if unchecked, the network providers would continue to enrich themselves illegally by subjecting their customers to discomfort. “It is fraudulent for network providers to charge people for services they never requested for, and when they complain, they promise to stop it but they don’t.
“In some cases, there is even no information as to how to unsubscribe and if you call them, it takes them forever to connect the calls. This means any busy individual might have to endure the extortion. A similar one is the promo offers. Even though it is optional and there are always terms and conditions, many people don’t bother to read through, so, the blame on that is equitable,” he explained.
The dissatisfaction of consumers with their service providers was further strengthened by a survey conducted in December 2015 by NOIPolls, a country-specific polling service in the West African region to develop opinion research in Nigeria. The survey revealed that in spite of the continuous rise in the number of subscribers and the increase in the usage of dual lines, there is a general decline in consumers’ satisfaction with services being provided by the various GSM operators.
Findings of the survey, a copy of which was received by our correspondent, showed that many subscribers say they are not getting value for their money from the operators, and the reasons consumers adduced for this include high tariff, poor network service, poor promotions, poor customer service and undue credit deductions, which they said have compelled them to have more than one SIM card with the hope of enjoying a complementary service.
Notably, the percentage of people using two lines has risen from 39 per cent in 2012 to 49 per cent in 2015, with majority still left dissatisfied. Findings also showed that some subscribers have dropped or abandoned their SIM cards and left them inactive because of poor service delivery and what they term extortion, which also accounts for revenue loss for the operators. A report had put the potential revenue loss from inactive lines at over N50bn monthly.
“For instance, almost half (46 per cent) of the subscribers who use MTN as their main line think they are not getting value for money from this provider in 2015, although slightly more than half (54 per cent) of the subscribers believe they are getting value for money from this provider in 2015. However, this figure represents a six-point decline from the 60 per cent satisfaction it had in 2014,” the report added.
The poll notes further that even though MTN topped the chart as the operator that provides the best services in 2015, a large number of its subscribers say they are not getting value for their money. Perhaps, the subscribers’ complaints tilted more against MTN, because, according to the survey, 88 per cent of mobile network subscribers use MTN either as their main line or as a supplementary line.
Similarly, the level of satisfaction of Etisalat subscribers seems to have declined, according to the respondents, as its rating by its consumers dropped from 97 per cent in 2013 to 65 per cent in 2015.
According to the survey, 15 per cent of Etisalat subscribers said they didn’t get value for their money because of undue credit deduction, as compared to Glo’s 12 per cent, MTN’s nine per cent and Airtel’s seven per cent.
According to the report, between 2012 and 2015, the percentage of MTN subscribers who said they got value for their money dropped from 57 per cent to 54 per cent, that of Airtel dropped from 72 per cent in 2012 to 52 per cent in 2015 and that of Etisalat drops from 78 per cent to 65 per cent, unlike Glo’s rating that rose from 63 per cent to 69 per cent within the same period.
The NOIPolls urged the Nigerian Communications Commission to ensure that consumers continue to have access to high quality telecommunications service by setting basic minimum quality levels for all operators. “With a sample of the size we employed, we can say with 95 per cent confidence that the results obtained are statistically precise – within a range of plus or minus three per cent,” it adds.
The slippery road to a better telecom service
Most of the mobile network providers have often blamed the network problems that consumers experience on high operating cost and infrastructural deficit, such as poor power supply, which they said makes them to spend more of their income on recurrent expenditure. They had explained that this had not enabled them to focus on other areas that could make their service delivery better.
According to them, given the nature of the service they render, which must be on and stable at every time of the day, they have had to rely on generators which they said cost a lot of money to maintain.
It was gathered that the telecoms companies spent about N45bn monthly (N540bn per annum) to power their Base Transceiver Stations in 2014, and given the increasing number of the stations and the likely increase in maintenance and personnel cost across the country, the cost incurred by the respective operators might have increased.
The Executive Secretary, Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria, Mr. Gbolahan Awonuga, had said recently that operators providing 4G internet service were the largest consumers of diesel in the country. Notably, diesel costs about N150 per litre. Given the number of subscribers in the country and the prevalent poor power supply, which operators have identified as a bottleneck, Nigerians might have to endure these issues and other shortcomings of the service providers for a longer time. Some experts in the industry have however said there was need for more base stations across the country. They noted that the about 30,000 base stations as of the end of 2014 were not enough to cater for the about 150 million connected lines.
The former Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, had said that Nigeria needs at least 60,000 base stations by 2018 to overcome the poor quality service in the sector, noting that the rate of growth of the stations had slowed down.
She pointed out that epileptic power supply, security risk, high cost of setting up the stations and maintenance, vandalism, stealing of equipment, delay in approval by the government have all negatively affected the growth of base stations in the country. Some consumers told Saturday PUNCH that the network providers might have been surcharging them to be able to meet up with their operating cost and boost their revenue.
Reacting to the issues raised about the service providers, the spokesperson for the NCC, Mr. Tony Ojobo, told our correspondent that the NCC has a platform through which subscribers could make their complaints, saying “complaints are treated as they come.” He added that the mobile number portability was introduced to give subscribers an opportunity to make a choice among the service providers.
He said, “Anyone who has complaints should complain to the network provider and in case they don’t get any redress, they should call our complain desk on 622 and supply the reference number that was given to them by the network provider, which indicates that they have already complained and nothing has been done. And we will take it up from there.”
On the issue of unsolicited messages, he said, “Even though some of the messages are advisory and could be beneficial to subscribers, what we have done is to ensure that they provide options for people to opt out and most of them have complied with that.”
Speaking on the inadequacy of base stations, Ojobo identified the issues confronting the deployment of base stations to include security challenges, community restiveness and multiple demands, approval from states and multiple taxes, noting that the NCC had initiated discussions with the Nigerian Governors’ Forum to draw their attention to some of the challenges being experienced by operators in their states.
Also reacting, the spokesperson for Airtel, Emeka Opara, said across the world, operators normally send messages to customers to inform them of new services. He added, “The only issue there is the message hits you when you are not expecting it and some of them come in at such times like midnight because of network issues, but I admit that it is wrong to harass customers with messages, especially at late hours. I’m a customer as well, so I feel it.”
About the illegal subscription and deductions, he said any man-made system was prone to error and malfunctioning but that when a customer comes with a genuine complain, the tradition is to respond to them accordingly.
He said, “These networks were not built by God but by man, which is prone to mistakes, errors and unintended developments. However, if your credit has been illegally deducted, go to any Airtel shop or call the customer care and ask them to stop it and if they don’t you have a right to complain.
“As a business, we do not set out to annoy or exploit our customers. However, sometimes people complain because they do not even know what they have done or what anyone else, like their children, could have done with their phones. Regardless, we do everything possible to resolve any complaints that come.”
Meanwhile, efforts made to get Etisalat to respond were not successful as the spokesperson did not reply the mail she promised to send, while MTN and Glo also did not reply the mails sent to them.
