allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Mobile Penetration and Real World Benefits (Page 1 of 1)

The NCC recently announced that mobile phone penetration had reached a staggering 60 million subscribers with 45 million of them active subscribers.

This is good news indeed and further testimony of the hidden value within the Nigerian telecommunications sector. Despite all the furore about quality of service and regulatory lapses, all participants in the industry deserve a degree of commendation for their herculean efforts in dragging Nigeria into the communications age from our comparatively moribund state, some 9 years ago.

However, I am concerned that many feel that we are praising the stakeholders because of our inclination to accept the ordinary, rather than demand the extraordinary based on that old Nigerian factor element which has gradually eroded our expectation of quality. Quality of service is not my focus today. I will write about it another time when I have collated the facts and can make an objective assessment of quality.

Many hold this perception because the sum total of their utility is making a phone call. Hence, service deteriorations are easily noticeable and harder to forgive. And understandably so. I believe that one should get what one pays for telecommunications penetration is affecting lives positively across urban Nigeria in almost immeasurable ways. Economic activity is catalyzed, business efficiency is enhanced social interactions are more fulfilling. Barriers hitherto thrown up by time and space have indeed been collapsed in many cases.

However, I am convinced that the appreciation of mobile telephony would have been significantly enhanced with more structured backend resources that subscribers can access to resolve everyday challenges. Two specific resources take centre stage in my mind amongst the hundreds that fit into this category of much needed consolidated information resources that ought to be available to mobile phone users. They are important because they may be the difference between life and death, in the literal and figurative senses.

The first is the emergency response service, a.k.a 999 service. This is probably the most basic logical consequence of a big community of mobile users. However, one must appreciate the complexities involved in putting this facility together. Ideally, the resources to respond must be in place when a 999 call is placed. If it is for police assistance, there must be manpower, personnel and equipment to attend the scene of the crime. If it is for a medical emergency, there must be ambulances, personnel and drugs to affect impactful medical intervention. If it is a fire situation, engines, water, personnel and appropriate equipment must be on ground. Other countries had these resources as disparate entities and telecommunications simply helped to organize how they where accessed.

In our own case big telecoms may need to realize that it will be the driver for the entities required to make the Emergency response concept work in Nigeria.

Another one that has continued to confound me is the implementation of a simple whistleblower Contact Centre for our teeming population of abused students who face all sorts of demands from their lecturers across our tertiary institutions. I am not casting this aspersion on all lecturers. I am sure some are dutiful and decent in the discharge of their duties. But there is a huge body of lecturers who force student to partake in sorting. Sorting could be presented as a sexual demand or a financial one. It could even be a compulsion to purchase particular lecturers books.

My major concern is that the students- our children have largely given up hope that anyone will rescue them so they simply play along and accede to the demands. In this tortured process they lose the incentive to study and graduate totally incapable of attracting any serious gainful employment - except those that rely on some touting of sexual favours. Effectively, the lecturers are unwittingly creating a society of mediocres who have passed through a system of education but are totally bereft of any real knowledge that will help them compete in the real world. In other words denying people education is not too far off killing them or preparing the conditions to ensure they can not do anything meaningful in modern society.

I am not saying that students are entirely blameless, and I am not suggesting that the ills will stop because of such a facility. However, this type of platform has a deterrent effect as the perpetrators know that students who have been pushed too far can be heard at the touch of a few buttons. It is a potentially powerful weapon within the arsenal needed to resolve the abuse side of our educational crises.

However, these two resources are yet to see the light of day, probably because we do not have the vision, strength of character or the organizational ability to bring them to fruition.

In the case of the emergency response, the NCC appears to be making some progress, and as it is saddled with the responsibility of facilitating the implementation of the facility, it recently placed adverts requesting expressions of interest. However, many opine that the battle for dominion may make the NCC's task difficult, as each emergency related agency may want some form of control, or in fact, total control.

My recommendation is simple. Government needs to determine which model it wishes to invest in. A top hierarchy parent- child model could see the centralized system simply filtering calls for the appropriate agency who would then take the call within its own child Contact Center, and deal with the allocation of response resources as appropriate. If the child Contact Center is ineffective, or resources unavailable, the essence of that particular distress call is lost.

Alternatively, calls could go to a Contact Center that is staffed by people trained on different aspects of emergency response, and linked to information about the resources available for each type of distress situation and their locations. In this scenario, response can be effected without the need to transfer the caller to a secondary child Contact Centre.

Regardless of which model is selected, there is a need to drive the project forcefully. This will probably catalyze action by respective agencies of government responsible for providing response resources directly under their jurisdiction. Another very important thing will happen. We will have consolidated information to establish who is performing and who is not. A consolidated source of dealing with emergencies will allow us to understand the scale and nature of distress situations and track resolution of those emergencies. Over time, this should enable more precise budgeting in providing resources to respond to these emergencies.

I am an optimist and will ignore the comments of a colleague who just reminded me that the N300m purportedly distributed as yuletide largesse in the Ministry of Health would have provided approximately 10 rapid response ambulances to complement the consolidated emergency response facility. My view is that we cannot advance an argument that others will fail to perform their duties as justification for inertia. If Government determines that the NCC should facilitate the implementation of the emergency response, let them pursue its implementation with aggressiveness and a structured plan of action predicated on a clear vision.

The seeming inability of our telecommunications companies to provide a student's helpline continues to puzzle me. If this facility is ultimately implemented by the same system that continues to fail the students, then it will be a shame as it is likely to become a failure, not be an endearing telecommunications experience. It may even become a funnel to siphon funds without giving students a voice. That scenario will be an indictment on all our telecommunication stakeholders who claim to be socially reasonable and who continue to celebrate telecommunications penetration without necessarily looking at real world benefits that telecommunications must help midwife.

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