By Austin Isikhuemen
I will forgive any millennial or Gen-Z, who cannot make sense of a government parastatal called Nitel or its twin called Nipost. They were parastatals that emblematized Nigeria’s inefficiency and graft. Their managers got fat while the parastatals grew lean and pauperized. Nitel died a shameful death while Nipost has been abandoned and forgotten in Intensive Care Unit. Nitel was an acronym for Nigeria Telecommunications Limited while Nipost is derived from Nigeria Postal service. While Nitel provided telephone, fax and telegrah services in the early days, Nipost provided postal services.
People wrote letters and took them to the post office, bought and affixed postage stamps and dropped them in a post box (P.O. Box) The letter arrived at the post office in the town you have addressed it to and it got collected from the post box owned by the addressee or the organisation, like a school or hospital who owned the post box. The addressee collected the letter from the post box owner. In some cases, there was those that owned a private mail bag (PMB) and such a bag, holding all their letters, was collected once in a while by the PMB owner.
There were obvious hiccups in this mail logistics process as it involved a long chain of handlers from the post office staff to vehicle drivers that move mails from city to city as well as a lot of mail sorters that were involved in the process. But the efficiency in the process those days meant that you could virtually use Armels, the vehicle that carried mails in the then Mid-West to keep time, as we did at Ehor, in Uromi when my family lived at my father’s maternal home in late Chief Agbota’s compound by the roadside. I was a toddler at the time. I also remember the men that used to clear bushes along the telephone lines on metal poles that terminated at the telecoms section of the Post Office opposite Eguare Primary School, then called Government School, Uromi.
There was nothing more important than postal services those days and the Post Office was the most important government agency that touched the life of the people, after the Nigeria Police and Primary Schools. It was the main means of communication. Those who worked there were tin gods and were respected in the societies where they operated. The postage stamp was as important as banknotes! In European countries and in some African countries where the post office has not been mismanaged as happened in Nigeria, they still provide critical services till today.
In 1998, while attending a brewing technology course in the United Kingdom, I mistakenly left my pressing iron in Copthorne Hotel Gatwick while relocating to another hotel in Park Royal. The next day, I returned from the Brewery to meet the same iron on my bed. It had been dispatched by post by the Copthorne hotel in Gatwick to my hotel in Park Royal, using the information filled by my study group earlier. It arrived the same day it was dispatched. So, Post Offices work in societies that make it so.
In Nigeria, the post office became so inefficient in the 90’s that people began to find alternative channels to move their letters. Letters were sometimes tampered with and cash and valuables stolen in post offices. The acquisition of post boxes was a source of corruption. Some postal workers colluded with citizens, Dr. Apoki would call them idiots, to use others’ post boxes to receive their mails. People’s share certificates got lost and students results and admission letters got missing within the postal system. It was not all sad tales though. I received my Guinness aptitude test and several interview invitation letters that culminated into my Guinness job through the postal system! I usually routed them through Professor Felix Okieimen of the Department of Chemistry in the University of Benin.
The post office is in coma today. Not many know it is still alive, some younger people are not even aware it exists. After the dismal performance that made their extremely profitable courier service to be cornered by bus companies and the orthodox courier companies, Nipost is today a shadow of itself that citizens would not care if it lives or dies, putting it bluntly. Ask GiG logistics and they will probably tell you that their courier service is more profitable than their bus service. That is the business that Nipost threw away, allegedly through inefficiency and heist by unscrupulous workers and management. I hear they render some good services these days but the horses left the stables long ago.
Nitel was the overlord of telecommunication and had undergone several name changes through Nigeria’s evolution. Their service was so critical as more people began to have need for telephony services in the 80’s. Not many could afford a telephone at home. Many areas had no lines and whether you could afford it or not was of no consequence if you lived in those areas. So, people had to go to Nitel offices and queue to make calls locally or to Europe. In my Edo State, the Nitel Office at Akpakpava was a place where people queued overnight just to make a two-minute phone call to a relation in Italy to let him know that grandpa had died or that John got married! Sometimes, it got to your turn and before you could say hello, the line went dead or start to blow popopopo and the rest people on the queue would order you out because you were wasting their time!
The above was replicated across the country. The Nitel Office at Sobo Aribiodu street off Mobolaji Bank-Anthony way and the Nitel Head Office (NECOM House) in Marina were even more notorious than the Akpakpava office. The staff were rude, uncouth and behaved as if they owned the planet! It was alleged that you had to bribe them to get a telephone line and bribe them to manipulate your bills downwards. Some people’s bills were reportedly charged to other people’s lines. There were cases where citizens that traveled out of the country and shut their houses came back and met bills running into thousands of naira at a time when a thousand naira was equivalent to a million naira of today! It was like the case of Eigbe drinking but Atuegbe becoming drunk in his stead!
When I asked an MBA classmate who was a manager in Nitel to help me get a telephone line to enable me run a phone service at my cybercafe when mobile phones were just being introduced, he asked for N120,000 outside the statutory fees that go to Nitel. Imagine if I was not a classmate! When President Obasanjo brought mobile telephony into Nigeria, Nitel folks still did not realize that the tune had changed. They were still dancing in the old style. Nitel had the telephony infrastructure throughout the country, even in rural areas. They got a telecom license (Mtel) on a platter of gold but could not change their ways, with unfit personnel manning strategic roles. They did not need to erect new masts, they had masts in abundance and, if they were smart and not blinded by graft and immobilized by personal wealth acquired through deliberately aggravated inefficiency, Mtel would have become the most profitable telecom service provider in Nigeria. They could even had got the new comers to share their masts and pay for such service. Where is Nitel today?
So, when I drove through Ahmadu Bello Way in Victoria Island and passed the former Nitel office at the beginning of what used to be called the Bar Beach but now a neighbour of the behemoth futuristic Eko Atlantic City, I shed a tear or two. A parastatal that had such a promise and future, but committed suicide facilitated by graft, ineptitude, and lack of patriotism. It is this undesirable fate that the struggle of NNPC reminds one of, when all they do now, allegedly and somewhat overtly, is trying to stifle Dangote refinery. But they need to remember Nipost and Nitel and change their ways.
Mr Austin Isikhuemen, a public analyst, writes from Lagos, Nigeria.
