My South African colleagues here in the office occasionally tell me stories of how elated they used to be in the days before commercial launch of GSM, whenever, after days or hours of trying, one of them was eventually able to strike a connection on the telephone from Nigeria to South Africa. "All of us would take turns to talk on the phone to our people and leave messages for our loved ones".
Today, GSM's growing pervasiveness is a bold pointer to how much it impacts on life itself. From practically nothing only three years, ago, Nigeria now provides for its people more than 5 million mobile phone lines, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission. This translates to telephone access for several millions of people. Many of those mobile phone lines are to be found under umbrellas across the streets and in business centres, sustaining a new means of livelihood for their owners while affording millions of Nigerians an opportunity to make a phone call at rates even cheaper than the mobile phone companies advertise. Such growth falls into perspective better when one recalls that the growth in telephone subscriptions recorded in a mere three years in Nigeria, took the better part of 10 years in the UK.
The growth in telephone penetration in Nigeria and the future potential for even more growth and pervasiveness tends to shift the paradigm of thought and minimize the fears of what was once morbidly referred to as the digital divide. True, Africa still lags far behind the more civilised parts of the world in telephone penetration, and internet access. But as clearly demonstrated by GSM, huge opportunities exist for Africa to leap frog the gulf by piggy-backing on the advances in cellular technology. Where once it took years and massive capital investment to lay cables across massive distances in order to install telephones, today, owning a telephone line has become much simpler, easier and faster on account of wireless technology. In three years for instance, MTN has spread its service to all 36 states of Nigeria. This has been largely made possible by the fact that it employs a wireless technology. Had it needed to invest in the kind of infrastructure that is ordinarily dictated by fixed line networks, certainly such progress in coverage would by now, only be a far cry.
The growth in telephone penetration in Nigeria also signposts the development that is silently spearheaded by this new fangled means of communication, the mobile phone. From jobs that are created on account of the array of consumables dictated by the mobile phone " airtime recharge cards, handsets and other accessories " to the jobs that are naturally dictated when enhanced communication leads to greater efficiency and effectiveness in the prosecution of business.
Elsewhere in the world, an array of value added services continues to be unearthed daily such that the mobile phone has become the veritable fore-runner and driver of that still burgeoning phenomenon known as m-commerce, "m" in this case, standing for mobile. The mobile phone is now increasingly used as a tool for ticket bookings and sales (flight tickets and football match tickets, for instance). It is used in providing traffic information to people, indicating for instance, what part of town is currently best avoided on account of traffic hold-ups. It is used in banking, with a mobile phone subscriber being able to check from the convenience of his phone, his bank account balance and even perform basic banking transactions. And very importantly, it is employed in yet another burgeoning area that is known as positioning systems, a technology that can enable GSM operators help trace stolen vehicles, and very importantly, help keep track of children, siblings and friends.
Positioning systems when GSM companies in Nigeria eventually make them available, will help minimise the number of victims of the growing malady of ritual killings in our country. The potential usefulness of the mobile phone in such instances was once made apparent to me when a young man recounted to me his ordeal after he fell into the hands of obvious ritual murderers sometime in 2002. He had just cashed some money from his bank on Bode Thomas Street in Surulere, Lagos and flagged down and boarded a taxi, not knowing it belonged to a ritual murder syndicate. Minutes later, a gun was pointing at him from the lap of the driver (he was on the front seat), asking him to cooperate or be "wasted". He would later find himself, alongside other victims in a room within which he believed must have been a home. With his mobile phone, which by now only had a few bars of battery power, he quietly alerted his sister, who in turn alerted MTN. Investigations by the company pinpointed his abode to be Apapa.
Advanced positioning systems would have been able to specifically trace the abode where he was held and perhaps help set him and his fellow captors free. The young man was eventually released after he was rejected by the Juju. He was blindfolded, driven in a car out of the compound and dumped on the streets of Apapa. Heaven knows however, what fate befell his co-victims, who he says included two children dressed in their school uniforms. In future, as operators enhance the depth of GSM services provided, just like the Ngige affair, Nigerians will be able to recount stories of lives of kidnapped victims saved on account of its multidimensional technology.
It is a whole new world of opportunities that is spawned by this technology. While we may worry about the occasional shortcomings of operators, including dropped and poor quality calls, perhaps we need to be re-assured that it is a formidable step forward that Nigeria has taken in embracing so strongly, this technology that impinges positively in virtually every aspect of our lives. We need to be reassured that operators of the service, while in business to make profit also depend on the progress of society to make progress themselves, and can therefore only commit to society's long term growth and development aspirations.
Okoruwa is on the staff of MTN Nigeria in Lagos
