Welcome to Nigeria II

“You said our country is an overgrown tissue of uselessness?”To say that Nigerians are wicked when they defend their country’s weaknesses and their leaders’ excesses is to flatter them.  They’re not merely wicked.  They’re fantastically, unrelentingly, and stupendously diabolical.  At times like this, one is left to wonder, as did Nelson Mandela, “why Nigerians are […]

“You said our country is an overgrown tissue of uselessness?”
To say that Nigerians are wicked when they defend their country’s weaknesses and their leaders’ excesses is to flatter them.  They’re not merely wicked.  They’re fantastically, unrelentingly, and stupendously diabolical.  At times like this, one is left to wonder, as did Nelson Mandela, “why Nigerians are not more angry than they are.”
To show people like my cousin that they’re living in Jahannam (hell), irrespective of their wealth, I’ll compare some services – which I took for granted in Malaysia – with similar ones in Nigeria.
INTERNET CONNECTION
When I visited Esteem School, I learned that they’re using 2MBps for their school-wide Internet connection.  For those who don’t know the school, Esteem is one of the better known schools in Abuja, which is truly international (at least it has expatriate teachers) with over 500 students, several classes and many administrative blocks.  Now this 2MBps is what I used in my house in Malaysia, a 3-bedroom flat.  While Esteem School pays over N50,000 monthly for its own connection, I paid about N6,000 monthly for my own.  This means I paid 6/50 of what the school is paying.  And I know the struggles the school faced in trying to get a stable connection for years before settling on this: each package came with its own promises only to disappoint them later. 
Yet, 2MBps is grossly inadequate for a whole institution. In fact I wanted to upgrade to 4MBps before coming back to Nigeria, interestingly, doubling the capacity would’ve added only N500 to my monthly bill.  Also, some people who live in the cities in Malaysia (I lived in a village) had a connection of up to 20MBps allowing them to download gigabytes of data in seconds, but even these subscribers don’t pay half of what Nigerians are paying for 2MBps!
I heard Google has a project now in the US where regular users would be provided with a service that will transfer data in GB per second – that speed is unheard of.  But we’re comparing a developing country (Malaysia) and a developing country (Nigeria).  So what does this mean?  It means we’ve only scratched the surface as regards internet connectivity and that Nigerians are paying too much for next to nothing.
PHONE CONNECTION – EVEN OUR COMPUTERS LIE
Since I came, many had told me that whenever they tried to reach me, my phone was always busy. Why would my line be busy when I had only bought it and therefore, only a few people had it?  It was a bewitching question, which was later answered at my friend’s house.  I misplaced my phone and asked my friend to call the number.  We’re greeted with: “the user is busy on the (sic) other call.”  Which other call?  I’m right here.  I was shocked to hear this brazen lie. 
The GSM system came to Nigeria in 2001; 12 years later, we’re still where we started. The only things that have changed are the expansion of the networks, annoying promotional text messages and millions of customers who can no longer do without it.  This inefficiency is the chief reason why Nigerians have more than one line: what they can’t find on one network they’ll find from the other – or so they think.  But even this strategy is flawed.  I’ve been here for a month now, I use two different SIM cards and none is better than the other.
Compared to Malaysia, call rates in Nigeria are cheaper.  However, my money was more efficiently used, I didn’t suffer from dropped calls, poor voice quality and so forth.  Besides, I’ve learned that call rates are inversely proportional to population.  That is, the more populous a country, the lower the call tariffs.  Malaysia has a population of 28 million people, we’re 160 million people, thus, calls here should be far cheaper than what they are now.
OIL AND GAS
In Malaysia, if I needed gas for cooking, I simply sent a text message and it was delivered to me.  When I needed to refuel the car, I paid at the counter and do the fuelling myself.  I wonder why Nigeria refuses to deploy this very simple technology at our petrol stations. We waste man hours and still the service is unproductive.  When we were going to the airport to fetch my lost luggage, we stopped to refuel and heard the attendant reprimanding a motorcycle owner: “why do you always come here? Don’t you guys have other filling stations to buy fuel?  I dey tired oo!”  She said this with an air that says “look I’m better than you!”.  She forgot the meaning of the attendant in her title.
While Nigerians are not sure of the kind of oil they buy and people die regularly as a result of adulterated oil, I did not hear of such thing in Malaysia; the same way I’ve not heard of anybody being punished for causing the death of many by adulterating kerosene and petrol in Nigeria.  There, you have the options of buying 95 or 97.  The 95 version is subsidized such that people come from even the neighbouring countries to fuel their vehicles in Malaysia.  Prices are 60 per cent cheaper in Malaysia than Singapore, Thailand, etc.
Petronas, the company which owns the oil and gas sector on behalf of the federal government, is itself, a success story of a public enterprise and an example of how our NNPC should be managed.  While about four different departments gave different figures concerning how much NNPC was making at a recent hearing, you can’t accuse Petronas of such deliberate act of confusion in other to pave way for corruption.
Actually, Petronas has been described by the New York Times has the best managed oil and gas company in the world.  The last time I checked, Nigeria was producing more than two million barrels of crude oil per day – to say nothing of the daily theft.  Petronas produces only about a quarter of that domestically.  Yet, what it owns around the world is a thousand times what NNPC has. It now has businesses in more than 40 countries.  In fact, I did my PhD in the university owned by Petronas.
“We are developing into a global company,” Mohamad Hassan Marican, president of the company said in an interview with New York Times in 1996. “We have set a target that by the year 2005, 30 percent of our revenue will be earned from international operations.” 
At that time, overseas business accounted for only 10 per cent of the company’s sale.  Three years later, the company increased its profits by 85 percent and earned about the same amount the French oil giant Total Fina Elf SA earned, “a far larger company,” according to New York Times.  By 2006, international operations brought 37 per cent of total revenue, seven percent more than what the president forecasted in 1996.
To be continued.