By Umaru Fofana
Mammy Iye, not her real name, travelled all the way from Boajibu in Kenema District to Freetown. Her son lived abroad. Every day for five days she would leave her Calaba Town lodge for the headquarters of the Sierra Leone Telecommunications (SLET). She would sit there for hours on end. She would patiently wait for that magic telephone call from her son.
However painful it might seem, she did so without complaint and with pride. Those she left back in Boajibu watched her with envy as she bade farewell to travel to the capital city to receive a telephone call from her son abroad.
At SLET, she was joined by others who’d travelled from various other parts of the country for the same reason: their children lived in Europe or America and they had sent word through that someone should travel to the village to let the mum or dad travel to Freetown so they could talk to them.
Others would record on cassette tapes and send them through. Woe would betide any of the children or wards who caused noise during those recording sessions. Deafening pin-drop silence! Even a cockcrow meant the whole recording had to be restarted all over again.
Some others would send often poorly-written letters usually not truly representative of what the parent actually wanted to convey. When I was growing up and in junior secondary school in Jaiama, Kono District, I was once asked by an old lady whose son lived in Germany, to write a letter for her. She was stark illiterate. But once I had finished writing the letter, she wanted me to read it aloud, in English. I felt awkward.
Admittedly I had had to write some of the things she asked me to write in the way that I thought she meant to say them, and not necessarily the way she had said them. But that was not why I felt awkward. I wondered whether she would understand it if I read anything that I had written incorrectly – grammar-wise or content-wise. I obliged nevertheless.
Today, the Aunty Iyes of this world don’t have to travel all the way to Freetown to wait for days to talk to their children abroad. There are mobile phones, even if some far flung areas still struggle with network. A huge improvement!
But with that improvement have come many challenges. There are grumblings that the service providers are being unfair to the customers, often even scorning them. Generally, the accusations range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Hear this: My wife’s best friend used to work for one of the now former mobile phone operators. Customers would queue up for hours just to ask what was wrong with their phones. When they were asked to explain, they would say their phone had not rung for days. “What is your number sir”, she would ask them. She would later dial up the number and the phone would ring. “Nobody nor call you all den days ya, na dat make sir”, she would say. The customer would leave, coyly.
There could still be ridiculous moments these days at the customer care centres of mobile phone operators, but there are far more serious issues to complain about. Voice call quality or the lack thereof and the method of charge, is one. Another is data – cost and speed. Plus mobile money transfer.
When I started working as a foreign correspondent, I went to the same SLET as did Mammy Iye to make what is known as Collect Call – in America and Canada they call it Reverse Charge Call. I would pick up the receiver and, I think, dial up a certain number (44, 400 or 100, I cannot remember now). The operator in London would pick up the call and ask me how I wanted them to be of help. I would give them the BBC telephone number which they dialled up and asked the operator if they would accept the charge. It was far more expensive than the BBC calling me direct. Land phones as virtually nonexistent as they are today, were a luxury then. And there was no internet in the country at the time. Sierra Leone connected to the World Wide Web in 1997 during the AFRC junta.
It therefore explains why when GSM got here initially, a sim card cost $ 40 and the Celtel operators deducted money from a number every day for just owning a sim card. They called it Service Charge. So the rip-off mobile phone users are complaining of today pales into comparison to where we were.
If Mammy Iye, who is now deceased, came back alive today, she would find this place unrecognisable for more reasons than one. Now customers are not as patient as she was, because our plights are caused by the telecoms operators and worsened by the regulators who are not as stern as they should be. Drop calls are commonplace. Data costs have significantly reduced but still said to be among the most expensive in the sub-region not least based on the cost of living of the average Sierra Leonean; although I have to say that during my recent visit to The Gambia in March I found their data cost, which had hitherto been far cheaper, to be far more expensive than ours.
For a long time, my love for Africell data had no rival, until recently. Since Orange got the 4G LTE licence, I now comfortably use both service providers almost equally. I long threw away my Sierratel modem. In fact I did twice! When their relatively new tricolour modem of green, black and blue was introduced, a friend assured me the supposed 4G quality had improved. I returned to it. It gave me much headache that I threw it away, again. Now with my Hotspot I am good to go, and with ease. It certainly costs a lot because of the pay-as-you-go plan. I have also dropped my Africell modem. It may sound stupid but it is sensible. I spend far less on my hotspot connecting my laptop computer, than I do when I connect only my computer to the modem. That is ridiculous. But that is the way it is. And no one seems to care correct this anomaly.
I think the mobile phone operators should introduce a monthly unlimited plan like the botched one introduced by Sierratel. It will earn them the customers Sierratel loses every day due to their eclectic service. It is certainly more and not less money for them, and peace of mind for customers.
In a country where the banks are concentrated almost entirely in the major towns and cities, you can imagine the life saver that mobile phone banking has become, even if it has meant pressure on those living in those urban areas with incessant calls from relatives in rural areas for cash. They would tell you “Sen am AirtelMoney” as they still call Orange, if you said there was no way of finding someone going their way.
Clearly Orange is the leader in this area. They have been in it for much longer. But with that has come criminality. By the regulations of the National Telecommunications Commission (NATCOM), every mobile phone operator is obliged to register every sim card before they become usable. The truth is that the two leading operators have been violating this without consequence. And it has had far-reaching consequences.
It has become commonplace for criminals to be hoodwinking people. They have tried me. They failed. But they have tried many others and succeeded. The success of these criminals has come about entirely because the mobile phone operators have failed to register sim cards, and NATCOM has failed to take them to task.
A friend of mine who works for DSTV was conned a few months ago. Someone called the company pretending to be the Clerk of Parliament. To shorten a very long and dramatic encounter, in the end a poor Orange Money agent was involved. The criminals used both Orange and Africell numbers to ask for money transfers, amounting to Le 22 million. The poor lady at DSTV is saddled with the unfairness of being asked to pay back. Both operators, who cannot trace the owners of the criminal numbers because of their failure to have registered the numbers, are not the ones being forced to cough up the money even though they have confirmed that the transfers did happen. It is only fair that NATCOM force those companies to pay back that money, not the poor victim of the criminality. If this does not happen, NATCOM would have failed in a fundamental responsibility of theirs, in as much as the mobile phone operators would have.
I wonder whether Mammy Iye would rather the old system applied today if only we were spared the encumbrances of today.
(C) 2019 Politico Online
