By Adekunle Adekoya
FOR the nation’s telecommunications companies, it’s the rainy season and a double one at that. Generally in this part of the world, the rainy season is underway, and for the next few months, torrential downpours will become normal experience. That is something we cannot do anything about, since the regulator is Mother Nature whose whims and caprices are above that of mere mortals.

But for our telcos who are in another kind of rainy season apart from the one decreed by nature, these are not the best of times in so far as quality of service is concerned. There is no gainsaying the fact that millions of Nigerians could not complete calls or could not even connect for a call in the last few weeks, or months.

Even phones misplaced in the house by toddlers could not be reached when you try to use another phone to locate it; you recover such phones after a long, arduous search while the toddler is busy at another mischief. Funny, not so? It’s either your party can’t hear you while you can hear, or vice versa, or your party just can’t be reached. It is a problematic situation.

But, like Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo once said, problems are like plants; if you go to the roots, they can be solved. What are the roots of these problems? They are many, and put together, indicate the type of society we live in, which also spells the operating environment of our telcos.

Serially, the business infrastructure of the telcos are damaged or otherwise vandalized, especially cables and base stations. If thieves go to a base station and cart away the generator powering it, it follows without fail that subscribers in the area covered by the base station are immediately cut off. If you factor in co-location, where the business infrastructure of as many as four telcos are on a single mast, all such networks are cut off in that area.

That is not all, there is also the issue of multiple taxation. Despite the fact that issues relating to telecommunications are on the exclusive legislative list, state and local governments, in a bid to shore up their internal revenue generation efforts have serially turned towards telcos.

In a bid to get them pay the levied taxes, base stations are often shut down, and between the time such stations are shut down, payment made and they are reopened, many subscribers get cut off. As a matter of fact, this issue of multiple taxes is one that the regulator found so worrisome that it facilitated the setting up of an industry working group to tackle the issue.

Then there is the problem associated with infrastructure, like roads construction and rehabilitation, for example. When contractors mobilize to site and begin work, earth-moving equipment often damage infrastructure installations like oil pipelines (one resulted in a pipeline fire in which scores were roasted to death in Lagos on May 16, 2008), fibre optics cables, huge water pipes, and others.

At the end of the day, services and products deliveries through these pipelines and cables are disrupted and form part of the overall poor quality of service in whichever sector is so affected. Who is to blame? The point is that these indicate how disorganized things are and by now, an infrastructure map indicating where what is should be available.

On the flip side, the security situation in the country needs to improve, while social responsibility appreciation should go up. Even a common thief should know that by stealing the generator of a base station, he won’t be able to call his accomplices.