The Great GSM (cell phone) Boycott: Civil Society, Big Business and the State in Nigeria

On September 19 2003, following weeks of concerted mobilisation, mobile phone subscribers in Nigeria took the unprecedented step of switching off their handsets en masse. The consumers took this symbolic measure in protest against perceived exploitation by the existing GSM phone companiesZimbabwean-owned Econet Wireless Nigeria Limited, the South-African-owned MTN Limited, and the Nigerian state-owned NITEL. Among other things, they were angered by allegedly exorbitant tariffs, poor reception, frequent and unfavourable changes in contract terms, poor access, and arbitrary reduction of credits. This event, which went virtually unreported in the Western media, has continued to generate ripples in the wider social pool in the country. At issue is a series of critical questions which the protest helps bring into focushow useful or reliable is technology as an instrument of social activism? How is (mobile) technology shaping the democratic momentum in Nigeria, and indeed the rest of the African continent? And perhaps most important, how useful is technology as a mechanism for the socio-economic empowerment of ordinary citizens? Using the boycott and the attendant fallouts as empirical context, this study provides a number of tentative answers. It argues that „9/19‟ (as it was popularly called in the print and broadcast media) ought to be appraised, first, in the context of existing mistrust between customers and transnational big business in Nigeria as evidenced by the conflict in the southern oil producing areas; and second, against the background of difficult state-society intercourse which has mostly been characterised by the latter‟s suspicion of the state‟s connivance with the corporate establishment. Furthermore, the paper argues that because it gives civil society a combined cause and instrument of protest, mobile phones in the Nigerian context presage the emergence of a new social space of politics and agitation. The paper concludes with a number of deductions which call for a rethinking of the scholarly paradigm on the interface between technology, citizen action and social activism.