Sometimes truth can be too acerbic to be accommodated by reality. It hits hard in the face to the point of irritation while others can simply sneer at a point of profundity which, of course, doesn’t look very popular. Listening to the MTN Nigeria boss, Karl Toriola, speak recently about his organisation and the entire telecommunications industry may fit the foregoing, superficially. You may also come to the easy conclusion that he is the chief executive officer of his organisation, the first-line marketing officer of MTN, so what were you expecting him to say? My point of intervention here is that Toriola deserves a listening, and doing so says so much about all of us, about an important industry, and about our nation where we seem to normalise even the absolutely bizarre.
But let me start with one issue that proved so exigent that he couldn’t have avoided speaking about it. MTN Nigeria has suddenly found itself in the eye of a wave of xenophobia; others say Afrophobia is a more appropriate word—sweeping across South Africa, a country that has failed its largely uneducated youths who still carry the vestiges of the apartheid era, and has become a serious concern to its corporate exports. The misdirected youths and a government with very low capacity are pursuing the immigrants from countries that helped them defeat apartheid. Some have been unalived in the most horrible way.
