Future of communication in Nigeria
By Aniefiok Ikoh
ONE unique feature of the African life is the strength of our communities and the richness of interpersonal relationships. Villages and clans are bound by a kindred spirit. A commitment to our community is imposed by tradition and it is a taboo to violate or break such ties.
This strong bonding gets even tighter and more functional as the relationships trickle into narrower tributaries of extended and nuclear families. The interlace of siblings, parents and grandparents, cousins and fourth cousins, uncles and aunts, great aunts and great uncles, mean more than just a family tree to us. These family network provide a living, emotional comfort and psychological support for its members. Kinship is to the African what government is to the American and European. It should not be mind-boggling to say that Africans thrive on family and community ties. These ties in turn thrive on communication.
Kith and kin who are flung wide apart by distances must necessarily keep in touch. They want to enquire about the welfare of their people. Those in the cities want to send information to and receive information from those in the country side, those in the countryside want to draw support from those in the city, and they all want to share information on each member of the family. The tradition had been for Africans to travel great distances to visit their people or discuss family and community issues.
But in Nigeria, where one in four Africans lives, all that is changing with the deregulation and democratisation (now you have a choice) of the telecommunication sector. The advent of private sector players in telecommunication has revolutionised the nature of our interconnection. Telecommunication has reduced the need for physical contact. Distances and other barriers to communication have been flattened. Families do not always have to hit the road all the time to share fellowship or information. A phone call would do, even from the village.
The Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication, which is the standard for mobile telecommunication in Nigeria, has become a part of urban life and increasingly an essential commodity in the rural milieu. An intimacy and a sense of being wired together, engenders a confidence that you are a shout away from your contacts and loved ones. The four GSM service providers " MTEL, Vmobile MTN and Glo Mobile " in just three years, have taken Nigeria to a level of tele-density unrivalled in over forty years of nationhood. From a mere 400,000 telephone lines in 2001, we now have about eight million active fixed and mobile lines with many of these lines active in rural areas.
Against previous assertions by some government officials that the telephone was not for the poor, some of these telecom companies have put telephones in the hands of the poorest of the poor.
For instance, Globacom, owned by Nigerian entrepreneur, Dr. Mike Adenuga jnr, has been particularly in sync with the pulse of the Nigerian people, especially the low-end and the middle class, which form a majority of the population. Many Nigerians believe the company has creatively done a lot more to bring down the cost of owning and operating a telephone line, making these affordable to probably every class of Nigerians. But beyond the spread and price revolution in the industry, the main revolution that some watchers of the industry are foreseeing is the revolution of the mode and content of our communication, using the same GSM platform.
MTN came out a few weeks ago with a new TV commercial that mirrors the way mobile phones has altered our family interactions. Not only do we share vital information instantaneously, we also can instantly capture and share the chemistry and electricity of an emotional moment among loved ones. That is the message in MTN's 'Na boy' commercial in the "Life Is Beautiful" campaign. This underscores the powerful way in which our culture and tradition are being reinforced with the telephone. What could be as touching as sharing the news of the arrival of the baby, within minutes of its arrival, with 'granma" , 'auntie', 'sister' and 'dede' or 'megida' or 'broda.'
Now, what if you can actually take a photograph of this 'bouncing baby boy', record sound bites of its first cry, and send it with a short message to granma and the rest of the family , all within minutes, using your mobile phone? Even a million words cannot match the impact of the photograph of the new-born grandchild. Imagine the excitement. Imagine the happiness that would be spread over hundreds of kilometers. Imagine family members spread all over the country but connected emotionally in an instant by sight and sound. I was thrilled to discover this is not just a possibility in the future, it is a present reality made possible by Glo Mobile.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that with Glo Mobile's Multi-media Messaging Service, one could actually take photographs with a camera phone and send it along with sound bites and text to another mobile phone. This facility has surely fast-tracked Nigeria into the advanced world of communication, where impact and effectiveness is created by a combination of sight, sound and immediacy. Some of us who are zealous to see the advancement of Nigeria, see this technology as the future of communication on the country. We see people conversing with pictures. We see more people taking advantage of this offering to transact all kinds of business, beginning with the family business. We see families saying what they have to say effectively with the illustration of pictures. Imagine discussing with a long lost friend on the phone, a picture of the lost friend you had sent through the same telephone line would save you the arduous task of long explanation.
With the multi-media messaging, distance does not devalue the power of a relationship, it enhances it. In a very dramatic manner, the individual keeps in touch with the rest of the community. We see families who though were separated by distance, sharing, at the same moment, the thrills and excitement of an on-going event. We see couples taking decisions together from different locations, in an instant, because they can both see and appreciate the subject of the decision. Beyond domestic purposes, we see professionals being more effective on the field because they could always send back to the "head office", multi-media messages, ask for advice and receive an immediate feedback which helps in taking informed decision from a remote location. This reduces errors and gives more meaning to the buzz phrase, "team spirit".
We ordinary Nigerians see a brand new world of possibilities in the multi-media messaging stuff; we believe this would be the standard for mobile communication in this decade. It would make our life easier; it would increase the bond between families, it would increase the excitement of our world, it would change the way we do business.
If communication is all about sending a message and being understood, then words alone are not enough to meet the challenges of communication in our exploding world. If a picture is indeed worth more than a thousand words, then a mobile phone that sends and receives pictures is the Nigerians' phone of today and the future.
