Features
DStv, Telcos vs Consumerism
Have you ever paid for an item, got home only to realise that item was defective? Then you took it back and you were told once you took it away, nothing could be done about it and you felt dejected.
You bought power from our own Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and suffered a power outage half of the time.
The experiences enumerated above can be very frustrating, not so? Or you went to a spot and asked for a bottle of Coca Cola and the steward brought you a Pepsi Cola instead.
In their minds they are all Cola, no? Then you send your ward to the butchers to purchase mutton and they bring beef home. You go to have the stuff changed only to be met with insults.
Service providers who you paid upfront will deliver a below-par service and get you angry and frustrated. We suffer in silence because many of these are monopolies who do not care about their clients/customers.
You will understand this if you subscribe to DStv bouquets. All that gets to you when you are watching your favourite channel and cumulus clouds gather.
The signals go off and you scratch your head in utter dismay until the clouds dissipate or after the rains have come and gone. DStv will not compensate you for the hours of lost signal.
What comes on your screen is, “There is no signal. This may be due to bad weather or faulty connection in the installation.”
At a point, I called their Customer Service and the lady I spoke to was frank enough to tell me they have no technology to avoid this occurrence. I cannot fault the poor employee, but this does not make any sense. In New York where rain clouds are darker and thunder claps seem to blow your eardrums, satellite television signals do not get interrupted when it rains.
Thunders do not clap in our parts; they only rumble mostly and are not as severe as in the temperate regions, yet satellite signals drizzle once weather itself drizzles rainwater.
The simple answer is that consumer rights do not work in our parts and we do not get angry with service providers enough, especially since some of them do not have competition in the marketplace.
Multichoice, managers of DStv, do not seem minded to invest in technology to keep their clients served irrespective of whatever the weather condition is.
The responsibility of protecting television sets from lightning must rest with the individual owner, not the service provider.
Every Ghanaian seems to own one cellphone or another. This undoubtedly makes life a lot easier for us. But then it is worrying to call a number and the response is that the number you are trying to reach is either switched off or is unavailable.
Many hours later you get through and the person tells you their phone was never off. What accounts for this must be explained by the Telcos.
You call an MTN number and you hear, “The AirtelTigo number you have dialed cannot be reached at this moment. Please, call back later.” AirtelTigo, when you dialed an MTN number? I have a number of MTN numbers especially, and at times I call one from another and I am either told the number cannot be reached or that the number does not exist. How come, when the two phones sit on my table near each other? Can our Telcos explain this?
Methinks the agency responsible for communications should come up with a legislative framework that makes it mandatory for every call to come with identification so as to eliminate scammers in the mobile telephony system, except perhaps numbers of national security interest. In other jurisdictions even calls to landlines come with the Identity of the caller.
Also, numbers patched with the Ghana Card must of necessity reflect when the bearer makes a call. This has the potential to eliminate fraudsters.
It beats my mind that numbers I have not acquired could appear on my Ghana Card as mine. Now with Artificial Intelligence making the waves, only goodness knows what tomorrow may bring.
So far, it is only the Glo network that registers incoming calls even when the recipient’s phone is off. I have not noticed this with the others.
Another annoying phenomenon is when you buy an item, paid for it and after having your receipt, it is stated at the bottom that goods purchased are not returnable. I wonder who came up with this stupidity. I do not think this can stand a test in law, unless there is a bold display of this edict that cannot escape the attention of the customer so that they are aware before making any purchases, otherwise they have a right to return goods they are dissatisfied with.
Having stated all the above brings me to Consumerism in Ghana. Attempts have been made to form consumer groups but those charged with the responsibility of legislating on consumer concerns do not seem to know what to do or are just indifferent. I was a member of a Consumer Protection Movement of Ghana in the late 80s but no matter how hard we tried, our efforts fell on deaf ears.
Consumerism is a big thing in many countries the world over, but it looks like our leaders here do not have a clue as to what Consumerism is all about. The fact that Ghana has a Standards Authority must be the impetus to couch legislation to protect consumers.
In many jurisdictions almost every product is covered by warranty, except perishable consumables which are themselves covered by standards. So, what sense does it make for me to buy an item here only to read that once I have purchased and paid it cannot be returned? How about if the product turned out to be defective?
But can they be blamed? If those elected to take care of us and protect us from capitalist cheats are looking elsewhere, who would not take undue advantage of us? This, of course, is no reason for corporate laxity.
Consumer satisfaction must be the driving principle of goods and service providers because, after all, without consumers no enterprise can flourish. Monopolies must not make a fool of their clients and our government owes us a duty to protect our wellbeing at all times.
*Writer’s email address:*
*akofa45@yahoo.com*
By Dr Akofa K. Segbefia
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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