MTN, Not “Everywhere You Go” By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

One of the public advertisement slogans popularly deployed by a communication network giant service provider, MTN, to dazzle its numerous customers is: “MTN, Everywhere You Go.”
This presupposes that subscribers to its network can make and receive calls from anywhere in Nigeria and across the globe. This looks very catchy and creative, but does the reality match the slogan or is it propaganda?
One needs not go far even outside the Nigeria’s nation federal capital, Abuja, to come face-to-face with the lie and deceptive antic that have been built into this popular, obviously bogus slogan, either deliberately or ignorantly.
It is instructive to know that MTN network is completely zero in Chibiri, a growing village, outskirts Kuje, in Kuje area council of the Federal Capital Territory. This village is inhabited by many civil servants and business people who commute daily to Abuja main city for their daily runs.
But, whenever they return to their houses, they have to switch off the MTN on their cell phones. No one needs to be told that a lot of missed calls or failed calls result from such total MTN blackout.
The irony is that some other network providers which do not make such loud-mouthed claim to being everywhere are fully on ground in Chibiri.
In fact, it has been noted over a period of time that residents of this village who are, in deed, ardent MTN subscribers, have jettisoned it and turned to such other network providers to save themselves the embarrassment of being shut out of the world in terms of communication.
Incidentally, the sub headquarter of this medium, Greenbarge Reporters, is being domicile in this village. The publisher locate the sub headquarter in Chibiri, believing that, as a village, it would soon catch up with the fast developing Abuja structure and scope and to take advantage inherent in the principle of spreading out. There are similarly other Firms and businesses springing up in this village, from where MTN can make an inroad.
To be sure, it is not only in Chibiri that MTN is out of the air: there are other locations spotted, including a part of the border between Abuja Municipal area council and Kuje area council. There are also businesses and trading activities going on in this area that have been using MTN for a long time, but are denied access to network once they are back home from Abuja city.
The concern many MTN subscribers has is the idea of the operatives of the network building such laudable notion about their network’s spread without a scientific proof.
One is at a loss as to whether MTN came up with “everywhere you go” slogan simply as a way of intimidating its rivals, without considering the implication of its negativism when it is discovered to be a lie, or it is based on research, conducted, of course, by its operatives that fed them lie all the same.
The MTN sweeping conclusion based on some hurriedly packaged advert campaign is, sadly, a reflection of the way most Nigerians do business. It is in Nigeria that so-called experts would propound any form of figure or percentage of people suffering from one ailment or the other, or the number of people killed in uprising without resort to scientific proof: most times, the people quoting the figure or percentage have not physically counted the victims. So it appears to be in the case of MTN, indicating that its market researcher did a lazy work with false result of “every where you go!”
As one of the early subscribers of MTN (I bought my sim card in 2002), I am personally affected by this blackout. I advise MTN management to either repackage the language of its advertisement so that those of us who have its sim cards would remove them from our cell phones to breathe “fresh air” or conduct further research on the shortcomings in its network’s reach with a view to correcting them, so that we would continue to be its customers.
Such research move would definitely has Chibiri as a starting point.