By Akeem Akapo

THERE is need to urgently   call out the false premises advanced in  a  back page  article of This Day newspaper of Monday January 9, 2016 for the obvious reason that it risks misleading Nigerians to  docilely  accept a country where big corporations call the shots.

The article titled “Why NCC’s Failed Data Price Hike was Flawed” by Sina Kawonise, a former Information and Strategy Commissioner in Ogun State,  is a study in the tyranny of a vocal minority, who in this  information  age  relishes  in distorting information to protect the interest of a few.

It is important as a conscientious citizen to immediately challenge the kind of flawed reasoning put forward in the piece and not to resort to the usual refrain that it is the business of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to set the record straight.

The Tecno Q! smartphones

If that commission is bullied into allowing anything go in the  telecommunications  industry it is us Nigerians that will suffer the consequences and one must for this very reason challenge positions that appear on the surface to be pro-people while in actual fact  are nothing but sucking up to big corporate players and, whether wittingly or unwittingly, acting as their  mouthpiece.

Data tariffprice floor

Even with the benefit of some enlightened critics having clarified that what the NCC did was to re-introduce a data  tariff  price floor as opposed to “hiking” the price of data, the writer persisted right from the title of his piece to mislead the unwary reader by suggesting that the regulator increased data tariff when it is only the mobile network  operators  that can hike or slash  the prices of their products within the band of industry benchmarks  – an upper limit called price ceiling and a lower limit, price floor.

This misleading information in the title of the article is a red flag that was only mitigated by the  writer  correctly  listing the amounts  currently charged by operators  per  megabyte of data  and this clearly showed that one of the operators, Etisalat, already charges  94kobo/mb which is  higher than the 90kobo/mb price floor.

Whatever joy one should derive from this positive note was soon undone by the writer  conveniently  omitting  the fact that    to “protect” small operators is to protect the entire industry, which includes Kawonise’s  favoured  big players.

One is left confused that the writer worried about the effect of a biting recession on the poor population but was piqued in the earlier part of his  write up  about how the concept of implementing a price floor runs contrary to “the logic and principles of capitalism”.

The logic that requires that one worries about  how  the poor cope with a recession must necessarily show concern for how new entrants into an industry survive to a point where they can grow to provide employment that will lift some of those poor citizens out of poverty.

Turning to the points marshalled by the writer to arrive at his concept of “flawed”,   first, anti-trust legislations and policies are in place specifically to prevent unhealthy competition and predatory practices whose end game is the demise of the competition. The demise of the competition is called monopoly. It is called oligopoly. It is ugly. If the big operators are allowed to continue selling data below cost price the new entrants will have to option but to  close shop; even two of the big four will likely fold up if the price war continues and that would leave Nigerians with an oligopoly of two or three providers that can then fix prices.

The United Kingdom, which was a ready example for the writer, is just but one out of the countries in Europe. To have and give a fair sense of how the phenomenon of predatory pricing is dealt with on that continent it would be fair to also give instances from a few of the 28 countries in the European Union on how they have dealt with anti-trust issues in the past.

The union has basically pulled the brake on how large Microsoft and Google (now part of Alphabet) can grow in their market  by instituting actions against them for abuse of their dominant positions.