ABUJA, Federal Republic of Nigeria. The House of Representatives yesterday urged Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to apply relevant laws in checking what it called unethical conduct of Telecom Service Providers in the country.
The house in plenary said virtually all the telecommunication service providers in the country are today engaged in “exploitative and fraudulent Practices”
The parliament reached the resolution following the adoption of a motion on matters of urgent public importance brought by Hon. Ali Madaki (APC, Kano) on the conducts of the service providers.
He asked the House to ensure that the NCC wake up to its responsibilities of curbing the inefficiency of service delivery, exploitative tariff system and provision of unsolicited short message services (sms) which he said “annoyingly” flood peoples’ mobile phones as well as arbitrary charges on unsolicited caller tunes.
“We are aware of what is happening in the telecom industry where service providers indulge in all sorts of sharp practices to make money. They have formed the habit of providing unsolicited services without customers’ consent and charge arbitrarily for such services without recourse to whether the customer asked or subscribed to such services or not”, Madaki said.
House Leader, Femi Gbajabiamila drew the attention of his colleagues to the criminal nature of the act which he described as harassment and invasion of privacy under the law.
“Let me add my voice to this important motion. Mr. Speaker, there are laws against harassment. This is a form of harassment. The constitution guarantees our privacy and also protects us from harassment of any kind, and these messages violate the constitutional provision that protects people’s privacy.
“We need to bring down the hammer. Be it South Africa or Dubai or anywhere in the world, there are laws guiding the conduct of business operators. And we have such laws as well; so I urge that we apply the law appropriately to safeguard ourselves against these abuses”, he said.
Minority Leader, Leo Ogor (PDP, Delta) argued that; “the conduct of these companies is totally unacceptable”.
“A situation where you call somebody and you can’t speak with the person but you are charged for a call that wasn’t complete is a breach of contract.
“That’s not all, the most annoying aspect is where they bombard you with unsolicited text messages and news alerts using short codes for which you never subscribed is highly outrageous and unacceptable”, Ogor stated.
Credit: Daily Independent (Nigeria)
