By Lanre Basamta
There are moments in the life of an industry when progress does not look like growth. It looks like a subtraction. It looks like pain. It looks like a sudden fall in numbers that once gave comfort to executives, investors, regulators, advertisers and the public.
That is what happened to Nigeria’s telecommunications sector after the Nigerian Communications Commission’s customer data clean-up and the implementation of the NIN-SIM linkage exercise. Millions of mobile subscriptions disappeared from the industry’s active subscriber records. The headline was dramatic. The reactions were predictable. Some saw it as a collapse. Some saw it as punishment. Some interpreted it as weakness by affected operators. And because Globacom was the most visibly affected of the major mobile network operators, Glo became the easiest company to discuss.
But the bigger story is not only about Glo.
It is about the Nigerian telecoms industry finally moving from inflated comfort to cleaner truth. It is about MTN, Airtel, Glo and 9mobile all being forced to confront the same hard question: who exactly is an active telecom customer? Is it a SIM card printed, registered, distributed and sitting somewhere in a drawer? Is it a line that once made calls but has since gone silent? Is it a number in a database with no recent revenue-generating activity? Or is it a real, verified, reachable and commercially active customer?
