Your Mobile Device – Friend or Foe?

The way we are going with our use of gadgets, we may soon send a delegation to Otukpo to apologize to David Mark. As Nigeria’s communications minister, he was confronted with people not paying their telephone bills. He ordered the now dead Nitel to disconnect debtor lines saying – poor people don’t own telephones. Of […]

The way we are going with our use of gadgets, we may soon send a delegation to Otukpo to apologize to David Mark. As Nigeria’s communications minister, he was confronted with people not paying their telephone bills. He ordered the now dead Nitel to disconnect debtor lines saying – poor people don’t own telephones. Of course, his statement was ‘misinterpreted’ to mean that telephones are not for the poor. I did not study semantics!

It is 2020 or succinctly, the 21st century and every Tajudeen, Dare and Hauwa now own at least one handset. A minister wants to limit the number to three – for mankind’s unholy trinity of I, me and myself! The way we are using these gadgets, we may borrow more than money from the Chinese. They locked down a town of 11 million people to contain the coronavirus aka Covid 19.

There is a gadget state of emergency requiring the poor and the maladjusted to give up their gadgets. Apart from the constant exposure to radiation, gadgets are causing more social harm than good.

Mobile gadgets have shortened spatial distances, but it has led to serious maladjustment. Gadgets have become the vectors of sudden death syndrome in marriages. In Port Harcourt, a wife stabbed her husband to death in the middle of the night for alleged cheating. A luckier man took the knife twice in Owerri. He jumped through the window to earn a bed a federal medical centre says press reports.

Without gadgets, nobody films people in their vulnerable moments. In the last week, two powerful people have been maligned for things done in their privacy. An ex-senator had his butt-naked image widely shared on social media. A female Kannywood actress suffered the same fate.

Our world is filled with open and hidden cameras where they ought not be. The Owerri knife attack survivor is lucky. Most victims of domestic knife violence by jealous spouses hardly make it alive.

The story of the Sandas has divided the usually conservative northern Nigeria. It is a case where a jealous wife killed the husband she accused of either cheating of preparing to cheat. She was arrested, tried and now awaits execution for her crimes. The couple are Muslims whose faith permits polygamy. Except in circumstances where a bride is offered as gift, or in arranged marriages; suitors have to meet and enter into courtship for marriages to occur!

Couples are finding out that even unsolicited amorous mails or texts could lead to the termination of their marriage or the death of one or both. The logic is that partners are one and that they have lost their rights to privacy. Subscribers to this logic believe that all gadgets must be password free. Relationships have collapsed as a result of spouses refusing to share their passwords with their other half. The worst weapon against peaceful homes is the gadget bought and fed with hard-earned cash.

Mobile devices have been used for good and evil. A young man in Kano found love in the arms of an American suitor he met online. Marriages have been contracted this way. From the rare experience of a journalist kidnap victim, we have learnt that one’s social media account or the pictures in one’s gallery could be the reason for death or life.

In a shared testimony PremiumTimes’ reporter Abdulkareem Haruna recalled that a picture of him in camouflage uniform in the exercise of his duty as journalist almost led to his execution in captivity. His abductors believed he was a soldier. They feared his military prowess could jeopardise their operation. Fate and prayers made him escape to tell the story.

It would appear that when abductors pick up their random victims, they go through their gadgets to determine their ransom value. Their guess could be as wrong as the police determining your culpability by the value of the gadget you’re carrying.

If you carry an iPhone, especially a current one, you are as much a Yahoo boy (scam artist) as those carrying backpacks containing their laptop. In the estimation of Nigerian security agents, a suspect is guilty until s/he can prove otherwise. One police officer ‘arrested’ a passenger in a bus, collected his brand new iPhone and smashed it after declaring it an affront. The sick officer told his victim that even after serving Nigeria for 30 years, if he couldn’t afford an iPhone, any youngster with one is a fraudster. Recording a crime, including ones committed by law enforcement could be fad elsewhere but in Nigeria holding your phone to ‘stand your ground’ could lead to untimely death.

Yet, the mobile phone has helped expose crimes and the excesses of those we pay to protect us. If there were no social media, Muhammadu Buhari would have convinced us that Boko Haram has indeed been technically defeated. His media guys would have gotten away with the lie that the president was warmly received in Maiduguri last week.

Our lives and homes have been exposed to ubiquitous spies. Our babies are addicted to streaming websites. Young adults would go hungry to get the latest gadgets only to be bullied into committing suicide over social media likes or dislikes. Our false life is advertised on social media with no shred of closeness to our daily reality. It has led to a rat race that reinforces the urge to commit crimes.

The big question to ask ourselves is – are we ready for the incidental and accidental problems associated with the ownership, use and abuse of our gadgets?