The Head of Legal and Regulatory Services at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mrs. Yetunde Akinloye, has said that most telecommunication subscribers across the country get ripped off or get into trouble with their telecommunication service providers because they are not sufficiently informed about the rules and regulation guiding the contract they enter into with the operators.
According to her, there are usually small prints in the contracts telecom operators provide, which in most cases, a lot of subscribers do not take cognisance of especially when promos are advertised.
Akinloye made the disclosure, at the 65th Special Edition of Consumer Outreach Programme, organised by the commission, in conjunction with the IBB Golf Club, in Abuja.
She said: “Despite all the awareness programmes and campaigns by NCC over the years, like the telecom consumer parliament, the consumer outreach programme and the consumer town hall meetings and all the rest of them, we have found out that telecommunications subscribers are still not as well informed as we want them to be.”
She said most subscribers do not report breaches to the appropriate quarters when their rights are violated or they are shortchanged by service providers.
She added: “Most times, most subscribers do not report such matters in the telecommunication industry.
“Also a lot of times subscribers do not read the small prints and so they see the big thing, there is promo going on like win N1 million, but there are also small print in it, which nobody pays attention and then they run into trouble.”
However, she NCC is working round the clock towards ensuring that that there is a lot of sensitisation on this.
“For us in the legal department, we want to ensure that consumers are protected and we do this through our regulation and guide lines. She said Section 4 of the NCA 2003 are regulations and guidelines that addresses consumers’ complaints.” All the vital information, she added are in the Commission website.
In an earlier remark, the Director Consumer Affairs Bureau, Mrs. Mariam Bayi, said NCC had articulated the consumer code of practice regulation 2007, adding: “From that we have asked the service providers to come up with their own individual consumer code of practice which actually tells the rights and privileges of how consumers should be treated.”
According to her, Service providers are expected to paste this in every customer care centre that they have so that when a consumer walked into a customer care centre he or she will automatically know what he or she is expecting from the service provider.
She said: “The commission ensures that service providers gives advance warning of anticipated disruptions or planned outages including details of the disruptions or outages, the extent of the outages and areas.
“We know that a lot of people might query this and we are expecting that they do that, but the question is, do they actually do it. Because sometimes, I know that as a regulator, we are also consumers, certain things happen and we have not been told that it will happen and may be for a couple of hours you don’t get any service, but may be because we keep pushing them and they are also here and I think there a time when there was a message from of the providers that we may have a disruption of service for a while, but I know that a lot of effort have to be made to ensure that consumer continue to get this information.”
“Because if you have a business to run and you need to contact your family and nobody tells you that you are going to have an outage and you find out that you cannot communicate with your device may be for an hour or two, it can actually affect your life or your business. So it is actually an ideal situation that NCC is hoping that one day we will achieve whereby these things will be fully resolved.
“NCC ensures that service providers give consumers bills that are accurate and timely and contains sufficient information about their terms and conditions. We receive complaints time to time from people saying that they have been wrongly billed and we have followed it up to the letter and the service providers, and for those that have actually launched their complaints when it passed to the service providers, the providers take their time to look at that bill and to resolve it and when it is not done, the complainants get back to us and we still push the service to do that.” Thisday
