Amaechi Ogbonna (Washington) and Chinenye Anuforo
Relief may have come for the telecos’ customers over the increase on the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) charges for accessing the banking services as the Minister of Communications, Dr. Isa Pantami, has swiftly ordered network operators to shelve its implementation, while the Central Bank of Nigeria ( CBN ) equally asked banks to reject telecos whose USSD transactions come at inflated costs.
Pantami has also directed the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to ensure the network operators, especially MTN Nigeria, maintain the status quo until he is properly briefed about the proposed charges.
The CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, in far away Washington DC, told the bank chief executives to move their businesses and traffic to telecom companies that are ready to provide USSD services at the lowest possible, if not zero, cost, in line with the bank’s objective to raise the nation’s financial inclusion target to about 80 per cent by 2020.
He expained that the controversial issue of USSD came up at a meeting with the telecommunications companies few months ago where he appealed to them to lower their charges. He, however, regretted that some of the mobile operators are still charging high rates which prompted the latest directive to banks.
USSD is a Global System for Mobile(GSM) communication technology used to send text between a mobile phone and an application programme in the network.
His words: “You are aware that there was a drive for us to deepen financial inclusion in Nigeria, I had even made my commitment to Bill Gate Foundation and Queen Maxima that we would deepen financial inclusion and that by the end of 2020, the rate of financial inclusion would have been increased by 80 per cent. At this time we are close to about 65 per cent. We moved from 42 to about 65 per cent in about 18 months. And we believe that we can achieve this 80 per cent if everybody, including the banks and the telecom companies cooperate with us.
“About four, five months ago, I held a meeting with some telecom companies as well as the leading banks in Nigeria. The issue of the cost of USSD came up, it is not actually N4 I heard, it was about N1, 500 per minute.
“And at that time, we came to a conclusion that the use of USSD is a sunk cost. What we mean by a sunk cost is that it is not an additional cost on the infrastructure of the telecom company.”
But the telecom companies disagreed with us, they said it is an additional investment on infrastructure and for that reason they needed to impose it.