OPINION: Of serial rapists, vampires and demons (2)
By Isaac Chii Nwaogwugwu
Yes, the banks have been adopting unconventional and not-so-customer-friendly methods in realising their dubious targets.
But are the banks alone in this nefarious behaviour? No! Far from it. That same practice goes on unchecked in the telecommunication sector, especially in the Global System of Mobile communication and data vending subsectors of that industry.
Just like in the banks, the ‘target’ assumes sordid meanings. It focuses on quantum leap of revenue anchored on broadband penetration and subscriber base expansion.
These are further broken down to call and data units and bundles which are juicily wrapped and delivered to the unsuspecting customers who have been drowned in the waters of oligopolistic non-pricing strategy that have left them with little or no choice in the quality, quantity and value of services rendered.
They are all the same. Inferior products marketed as standard ones. The annual global revenue target is packaged in billions of naira.
The billions are allocated to revenue generating units, the sales, marketing and customer care departments with a matching order to deliver or face consequences of ‘underperformance’.
Your ability to meet the A1, A2, A3, A4 and A5 targets (or their equivalents) will determine whether your premium rating in the organisation is at par, premium or deficit.
You will be fired if you are ‘surplus-to-requirement’. The vulnerable field workers are left with little or no option than to act as expediency requires. Smart bundles of data or voice calls are designed.
They are all manipulated. Drop calls begin to run into billions of seconds while rolling over of unused data is permitted under terms and conditions that cause a spontaneous shaking of your head and waggling of your feet.
You buy data today and tomorrow it is gone. You buy airtime in the morning and you will have only ‘one minute left’ in the evening.
You’ll look up and down wondering if some free riders had accessed your device while you were blinking.
‘Target’-driven performance index is continuously perforating holes in our accounts, in our pockets.
They will tell you to recharge N300 and win a smartphone . To buy data of N1000 and win N1million every hour.
They have become lottery bodies even as they court the wrong side of the law. Yes, they have their jumbo and combo packages of all manner that translate into dubious deals for the product users.
They will give you 25 gigabytes of free data and make sure that you won’t have the network to use it.
They will give a bonus airtime of N10, 000 with the promise of charging you N20 per minute but will end up charging you over N75 per minutes in most cases. The more you look the less you see.
These promotional strategies have become smokescreens for fraudulent transactions.
They are a ruse for consumer exploitation. They are highways to ornamented balance sheets that conceal the mess of weak and enemy operators.
Don’t tell me that this is how telecommunication services are delivered in the rest of the world. No wonder they just posted a double digit growth rate of 18 per cent while the manufacturing and other sectors contract.
The satellite or cable television operators might as well be captured here.
They have refused Nigerians the opportunity to enjoy benefits of pay per view which has been the model in virtually the rest of the entire world civilised and uncivilised, developed or underdeveloped even in some countries of sub-Sahara Africa.
Worse still, they review their tariff upwards so frequently that one wonders if we have become the Automated Teller Machine of these manipulative corporate bodies.
The design of the bouquets is funny. Varieties that are differentiated by a popular channel or two are disproportionally reflected in the tariff.
Meanwhile, they can have fewer bouquets that sharply fall in their own classes at value-for-money rates. But they won’t do that.
You renew your subscription today for one month just because of your favourite progeamme that comes up later that same day.
You travel the next day and return after one month. You turn on your television set and all you get is an error notification.
Your subscription has expired. You just realised that you paid for one month’s subscription just because of a 90-minute programme.
You paid for 2,592,000 seconds of viewing time but all you got was 5,400 seconds. You have been robbed of 2,586,600 seconds.
You just bought a pig in a poke. You have been duped. And you will be duped repeatedly in the typical style of a serial rapist.
The vampire. The demon. They don’t care. They don’t give a damn. That’s the style of Nigeria’s satellite/cable television operators.
They enjoy the monopoly power artificially enabled by a dysfunctional state. Traditionally, a monopolist is only at liberty to fix either the price or the output. They can’t determine the two at the same time.
But alas! The monopolists in Nigeria’s satellite/cable television subsector fix both the price and output.
They surely go an extra mile to defy the traditional and conventional theory of the subject.
That practice is guided and guarded by obnoxiously defined performance targets. It targets your pocket.
Your bank balances. And their enhanced balance sheet. They must feed fat at your expense. Yet, a slight change in weather conditions causes an automatic deterioration in the quality of picture.
A momentary drizzle lowers both the signal strength and signal quality while their account buzzles endlessly.
Don’t tell me that these people who design those exploitative packages are human beings. Are they rapists? Are they vampires? Are they demons? Do they need the services of the exorcists?
Maybe they do for it is difficult to understand how utility organisations that are conscious of ethical values, social responsibility and contractual obligations will deliver their services in the most deceitful style.
Our satellite/cable television service providers are heartless. They are mean. Yes, Nigeria’s satellite/cable television operators are indeed wicked.
But you will be wrong to think that schools and hospitals in the private sector of the economy are not under this spell of taking an undue advantage of the vulnerable citizens.
The government is continuously reneging on its responsibility in the provision of education and health services.
These two sectors are categorised as merit goods because of the special place they occupy in the life of every modern state.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So the space vacated by the government has been occupied by profiteering and rent-seeking individuals and organisations.
Many of them don’t have the skills and facilities to venture into those sectors. They are mostly quarks by definition and practice.
They define their own revenue target. Yes, dubious target carefully subsumed in a decorated content that is grossly lacking in substance.
The schools charge you thousands of naira for the school fee of your child per term. They get caged in a two-story building constructed on a plot of land.
No playground for these little human beings bubbling excessive energy. No qualified teachers. No standard facilities.
But you must pay the PTA fee. And the development levy. And pick-up charges. And the club fee. And money for practical works. And club money.
They are all mostly exaggerated. You pay for everything including the hidden charges to settle the examiners during external examination.
The school must have good results. The school must have good rating and the parents must pay for it.
The same thing applies to the hospitals where you have to buy or pay for all the drugs the cost of which has already been captured in the basic charges.
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Nobody cares. Nobody wants to know.
You either pay for it or face the consequences. Don’t tell me that the proprietors of some of these schools and hospitals are human beings. Are they rapists? Are they vampires? Are they demons?
Do they need the services of the exorcists? Maybe they do for it is difficult to understand how merit goods producers predicate their operations on strategies that defy all rules of their industry simply because of meeting the balance sheet target surreptitiously defined. Many education and health service providers are inhuman.
