By Emma Okonji
Telecoms consumers in Epe Community, a suburb of Lagos, last week, came out in their large numbers, led by their traditional leaders, to complain bitterly about the poor telecoms services in their community.
The subscribers, who spoke during the 37th edition of the NCC’s Organised Consumer Town Hall Meeting (CTM), which held in Epe community, thanked the telecom sector regulator for bringing such CTM forum to their community, and used the occasion to lodge several complaints bothering on poor telecoms services across all the networks in the community.
Having thanked NCC for bringing all the telecoms operators to their community, they also urged it to compel the operators to improve on their services in the community that is made up of large concentration of people.
They also proffered solutions on how best the telecoms operators could serve them better.
According to them, while a larger part of the community is without telecoms coverage, the other parts suffer poor service quality, ranging from persistent drop calls, poor voice clarity, delay in the delivery of text messages, and above all is the constant receipt of unsolicited text messages and calls from service providers.
Addressing the community, the Director, Consumer Affairs Bureau at the NCC, Mrs. Felicia Onwuegbuchulam, thanked the traditional leaders and their subjects for turning out in their large numbers to lodge their complains about telecoms services rendered in their community.
“The forum is one of the initiatives of NCC to bring together, telecoms consumers in the rural areas with the network operators and the regulator to discuss, proffer solutions to consumer related issues and ensure they have value for money through effective service delivery,” Onwuegbuchulam said.
According to her, NCC has developed series of initiatives that would empower the consumers and ensure that their rights are fully protected. She encouraged consumers to subscribe to the 622/2442 Don Not Disturb (DND) code, where they can stop unsolicited messages.
Deputy Director, Consumer Affairs Bureau at NCC, Alhaji Ismail Adedigba said NCC, after declaring 2017 as the year of the consumer, went ahead and stepped up programmes aimed at empowering and protecting telecoms consumers with focus on key drivers such as the NCC 622 toll free line to lodge unresolved complaints to NCC and the 2442 DND short code to stop unsolicited messages.
In his presentation, the President of Wheel of Hope Consumer Advocacy, Mr. Jide Abdulazeez, called on telecoms operators to do more about proper information dissemination and to translate the information in major Nigerian languages such as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo and Pidgin English for effective communication.
