The Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy has taken another swipe at Nigerian telcos, this time, over the automatic activation of voicemail services at the expense of subscribers. It has been one of the pills that Nigerian network users have to swallow in helpless silence.

The Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Pantimi, has thus, in a statement issued on Thursday, and was signed by the spokesperson of the Honorable Minister, Mrs. Uwa Suleiman, directed all the telcos to halt the practice of voicemail by default. The statement says:

“The attention of the Honourable Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, has been drawn to the latest trend of financial exploitation by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) in the country, through the automatic activation of the voicemail service on their platforms. Based on recent reports reaching the office, the practice has gained momentum in recent times.

“The voicemail services should be accessed at the discretion of the subscriber and not by default. The Honourable Minister finds it worrisome and totally unacceptable that telecoms subscribers incur financial charges, for a service they are compelled to use by default. Voicemail is not a popular service among mobile phone users in Nigeria, coupled with the language challenge among rural dwellers, who mostly do not understand the language deployed by these networks.

“It is apparent, that the recent clampdown on the exploitative activities of some Mobile Network Operators in the country, has beamed the searchlight on the sector properly, and some unpatriotic elements in the system are devicing subtly, ingenious methods of defrauding Nigerians. The Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy under the current leadership of Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantimi), will neither overlook any acts, regardless of how subtle, that undermine the Anti-corruption Crusade of president Muhammadu Buhari GCFR, nor condone any attempt to defraud Nigerians and indeed, all subscribers.

“In the light of this, Dr. Pantimi has issued a broad policy directive to the sector regulator, Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC), to immediately ensure that issues regarding automatic voicemails are addressed on all existing phone lines and the subscribers given the option of accessing the service via an activation code. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that the rights of consumers are protected, while providing a conducive business environment for mobile network operators, in line with global best practice.”

Nigerians complain that telcos have been enjoying exploitative services with a full measure of impunity; the automatic voicemail is just one of the many of their sharp practices which are against the international best practices.

In many other countries, the choice of activating voicemails is solely the subscriber’s, the mobile network operators only provide you with the needed instruction to set up your voicemail. For instance, a Vodafone subscriber in Australia, who wishes to set up a voicemail has to do so following a few steps: Dial 121 and follow the instructions which will be the following: selecting a voice security code for checking messages from another phone, recording your name for your standard greeting, setting your time zone by selecting your state.

Once your voicemail is set up, you are required to stay on the line to personalize some of the options like switching your security code prompt on or off. You are further instructed on how to access your voicemail from your phone and from another phone, calling certain numbers with security code when you are accessing it from another phone.

This is an example of international best practices, but it is far from what is obtainable in Nigeria. As the communication minister noted, most Nigerian mobile phone users don’t know what voicemail is and they don’t care to know. Left to them, voicemail will never be activated. But they are the ones paying daily for it because it is on default, and will activate automatically once you try to reach unavailable subscriber.

The only warning comes in a monotone: “at the tone record your message.” Most of the people hearing that don’t really know what it means, in most cases, especially in the rural areas, they think the person they are calling have picked up, so they end up paying for the voicemail without knowing it. And the receiver will not be notified of any voicemail because he didn’t set up a voicemail and he doesn’t even know how to access it.

So the idea of voicemail by Nigerian telcos has been nothing but means of exploitation and Nigerians have been on the receiving end far too long.

As TikTok fights to stay alive in the U.S. over the government’s investigation into its activities on the suspicion that it’s enabling the Chinese government to spy on the U.S., it seems there is yet another battle it has to fight: Instagram.

Instagram is launching a video-music remix feature that will replicate major functionality of the Chinese Social media, the “Reels” feature. Instagram is not developing it as a separate app though; it’s introduced as a new feature in the app’s stories.

“Instagram is launching a video-music remix feature to finally fight back against Chinese social rival TikTok. Instagram Reels lets you make 15-second video clips set to music and share them as Stories, with the potential to go viral on a new Top Reels section of Explore. Just like TikTok, users can soundtrack their Reels with a huge catalog of music, or borrow the audio from anyone else’s video to create a remix of their meme or joke” – TechCrunch.

The Reels will enable users to create short videos which can be shared and remixed, a feature so typical of TikTok. Although Instagram director of product management, Robby Stein, gave the credit to musically, it is an obvious rip off. He told Techcrunch:

“I think Musically before TikTok, and TikTok deserve a ton of credit for popularizing this format.”

One thing is clear from this blatant attempt to discredit TikTok in a bid to justify the replication – Facebook has become wary of TikTok, and it is just one of the many promising social media platforms that have made it paranoid.

In 2008, Myspace was commanding the usage of over 75 million people monthly, a number that drastically fail in two in the space of two years, due to the emergence of Facebook. It was not a tragedy that Myspace saw coming, neither were they ready to handle it. So the once bubbling social media site became a once-upon-a-time tale. Facebook knows that it could be next if it doesn’t tread carefully, and the paranoia has left them with two options whenever they figure out a potential threat: Buy or copy.

Armed with a great number of over 2 billion users and a lot of cash to spread around, Facebook took the position of the defender and the attacker at the same time.

In 2012, Instagram was just two years old, commanding 30 million users, with the potential to amass more. It had something Facebook didn’t have, and people were finding it captivating. Facebook was going to clone it, whatever it was that kept more people going to Instagram, but on second thought, they changed their mind. Why duplicate a function that you can buy in full? Mark Zuckerberg rolled out $1 billion, and Instagram became part of Facebook.

In 2014, Facebook doled out a whopping $19 billion for the messaging App Whatsapp. It’s become a threat to Facebook messenger, taking millions of people off Facebook with the speed of raging fire. All efforts to tame the tide by improving Facebook Messenger were unsuccessful. So Mark activated the first option in neutralizing a threat – Whatsapp became part of Facebook.

Around that time, another potential threat was lurking in the corner, though not visible enough. Until a huge number of young people started turning away from the features that Facebook once used to entice them – it was no longer cool. It was then that Facebook saw who was receiving the large number of people it was losing – Snapchat.

Facebook knew it’s another war it has to win using any of the options in its arsenal. The statement they issued then confirmed that:

“We believe that some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware of and are actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook. For example, in the third quarter of 2013, the best data available to us suggested that while usage by U.S. teens overall was stable, DAUs among younger teens in the United States had declined.”

It was more of a call for action than acknowledgement that it’s losing on many ends. In the next few years, Facebook was aggressively offering to buy Snapchat, and attempt that did not materialize like in other cases because Snapchat refused to sell. Their decision not to sell only meant one thing; Facebook would activate option number 2, which they did.

Facebook started cloning many of Snapchat’s features and functions, the mimicry got to the point that Miranda Kerr, the fiancé of Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel took a shot at them. She said:

“Can they not be innovative? Do they have to steal all of my partner’s ideas? I’m so appalled by that… when you directly copy someone, that’s not innovation, it’s a disgrace. How do you sleep at night.”?

Many would have been glad if the story ended with Snapchat, but it didn’t, and didn’t surprise them either. TikTok has become the latest victim of the bully’s paranoia, a symptom of phobia of being relegated by a newcomer. Though most of the cloned Snapchat’s functions didn’t survive the test, the attempt slowed Snapchat down, and it took a couple of years before it got back again on its feet.

TikTok may face the same fate, and in the face of current government’s inquiry into its activities, the recovery may take longer. Though Instagram said the feature will only be available in Brazil for now, it doesn’t need a rocket to get to other countries. With Facebook user numbers and financial status, eliminating competition has become more of a figure of speech than a rigorous action.

The call to break Facebook up has been because of its ever growing influence, a dangerous trajectory to the competitiveness of the tech industry.

The Too Good to Be True Offer

Scaling up as a startup could be a really daunting task, hence many startups come up with what I call the “The Too Good to Be True Offer” where they clout themselves by offering very affordable services at zero percent profit margin, no profit or even at a loss. This would actually gain them traction quicker in terms of customer base acquisition. But coming from Nigeria where the popular saying “AWOOF DEY RUN BELLE” is common on the lips of every person in Nigeria, this trend has to be explained in another angle.

Nigerians no doubt like free things a lot and wouldn’t hesitate to clout, carrying out tasks the company gives just as long as the Awoof period is still on. But now for the company they are enjoying the Awoof patronage which would later run their belle in the sense that when they finally want to adjust their business models, for profitability, they end up not having those customers they thought they had initially. This is because Nigerians would rather patronize the next man if their current man hikes the price.

A clean case sample is the platform Kudi.ai which when they first started out weren’t charging commissions from their customers, for transactions carried out via their platforms, and when they finally decided to start charging, I read an article on how the CEO stated they lost a whole chunk of their customers. That happened because they noticed that these clients were only there for the freebies; nonetheless, it helped them to re-strategize and refocus on KYC better and to further serve customers better.

The same applies to the telecoms disrupters back then e.g. Multi-Links. This company came up with the cheapest phone that could do everything back then and to top it all free calls and browsing. It initially captured the market but when it wanted to remodel, everybody dropped their phones and moved back to their respective Telco phones.

I always advise people not to grow their pages using giveaways and freebies even though they are very effective.

However MTN, Glo and Econet (now Airtel), knew this trick on-time and they exploited the offer by capitalizing on two customer acquisition models, Fear of Losing Out and Need of Urgency in the sense that a lot of people were tired of Nitel, the inefficient state monopoly.

Hence Nigerians urgently needed a fresh of breath air, and when it came, they were all scared of losing out of the offer due to their need of urgency.  No wonder, reports have it that MTN achieved profitability ahead of projections.