Interrogating Glo’s eighteen years on the move

A disoriented woman is seen in this viral video almost querying God for her life of pains.

The persons behind the camera insist she must be arrested for trading where she is without permission. Her shop is made of palm fronds planted in the middle of nowhere. She is one of those women who eke out a living selling everything that is nothing. But, even in this moment of sad fury in the video, she is seen flinging out the wares that hold her existence. She proceeds to strip herself stark naked in protest against the unseen persons threatening and recording her for the world to mock. Addressing her tormentors she says in her Egun, Yoruba dialect: “What wrong have I done? What do you want from me? I have never hurt anyone in my life so why do I deserve all these attacks, suffering and unmitigated humiliation?” She goes on and on talking and destroying everything she has. Still, her attackers are not relenting. She must be arrested for resisting arrest, one of them said. It turned out much later that the woman’s real sin was not trading illegally where she was. Her original sin was her refusal to date a man in uniform.

Her adversaries recorded the video and released it to the Internet. The Internet and its social media platforms feasted on it and took it far and near. The act was apparently meant to break her spirit and destroy her resolve to continue living. But, it turned out that the video was God’s design to elevate her beyond the imagination of everybody involved in the drama. She became a big beneficiary of Globacom in two ways. The big man behind Globacom, Dr. Mike Adenuga Jnr. reportedly watched the viral video online and launched a search for her. Weeks later, through an Ibadan-based popular gospel singer, the woman was found somewhere in Yewaland, Ogun State, truly broken and downright down. Then she was taken to Lagos and her sad story ended in praise forever.

As we interrogate the trajectory of that woman’s raise from hopelessness to somebody, we should ask if she would not have suffered and possibly die cheated without getting her story out if there was no tool to exhume her. So, the point here is that she is, in significant terms, a beneficiary of the technology that made it possible for that video to go viral and for her to be located by the right person through the social media. Incidentally, Adenuga’s Globacom is again the benefactor here. How? I will explain.

The world of technology is a dancing masquerade. Its dance steps may be cyclical, but like one on a spiral step, it moves up and up and only the mobile would catch up with its beauty. A milestone in communication technology was achieved around 2007 when high-speed access to data and voice services evolved from what had been. It was a tectonic revolution that changed, in radical terms, how and what people communicated on phone and online. With it the whole world became a universe of inter-connected villages exchanging not just texts, but photographs  and videos. Social networking and general information sharing became a fundamental part of everyday life. Nigeria plugged into that movement when Glo launched the 2.5G GPRS technology and, soon, 3G Plus.

The operator followed this up soon by building an $800 million high-capacity fibre-optic cable known as Glo-1. It is the first successful privately funded submarine cable laid from the United Kingdom to Nigeria. Then 4G/LTE technology came. The result is the seamless satisfaction the Nigerian Internet user enjoys today. And the beneficiaries include the victim-woman in the viral video above and several others in Nigeria who have been so quietly saved.

Millennials would likely have launched the digital version of the EndSARS protest if they made six-seconds phone calls and were compelled to pay for sixty seconds. But that was what their fathers suffered in the hands of foreign entities from August 2001 to August 2003. Like flies in the hands of wanton boys, they were helpless. It took the licensing of Globacom, a wholly Nigerian company, exactly eighteen years today, to change the story by introducing what became popularly called per-second billing. It is twenty years this month that the GSM technology came to Nigeria. Eighteen of those twenty years arguably belong to Globacom and its table-shaking offerings.

History says the Global System for Mobile Telecommunication (GSM) journey started in Europe in 1982. It adds that the very first GSM call was made in 1991 by Finnish Prime Minister, Harri Holkeri, in Helsinki to the Mayor of Tampere, Kaarina Suonio. The following year, the first SMS was sent. GSM connections hit one million in 1994. Digital Mobile telephony entered Nigeria in August 2001 and by 2003, the first EDGE networks went live abroad while access to the networks in Nigeria became really affordable in August that year when Globacom entered the field and changed the game. Forever, Nigerian telephone subscribers, courtesy of Glo, stopped paying for minutes they did not buy. From 2001 to 2003, owning a mobile telephone line was a capital intensive project for every Nigerian who desired it. SIM cards were as expensive as telephone sets. It cost a minimum of N30,000 to acquire a GSM line. There was, however, a seismic disruption of this house of exploitation when Globacom came and brought down the roof, selling its own lines, first, for N9,999 and very soon later for N1 (one naira) only. Adenuga’s Glo also offered both sim and Alcatel handset for N18,499.

Then Vice President Atiku Abubakar put a call through to then President Olusegun Obasanjo. The call was a historic one – it was the very first call from a Glo mobile line. The call went out at exactly 11.45 am on Friday 29 August, 2003. That was the classic, dramatic way Globacom rolled out its services. And that was 18 years ago. So much water has since passed under the bridge. Swahili speakers say two bulls do not enter the same ring; one must excuse itself or be knocked out. Apart from walking out shylocks from Nigeria’s communication space, Glo also walked in mobile banking and mobile internet services to Nigeria. It got involved in sports, entertainment and community service. Annually, it sponsors the Ojude Oba festival in Ijebu Ode; Lisabi in Abeokuta and Ofala festival in Igboland. It Currently sponsors live matches of the English Premier League.

Where I come from, elders counsel seafarers never to set sail on someone else’s star. The vaunting moons of others have no navigational importance to the focused. The serious-minded has its own wristwatch which drives its haste to excellence and history-making. The elders also hold it that great institutions are like great people, they become great when others are sleeping. That is the story of Globacom, a giant that clearly defined its own life-route and destiny right at conception, and has kept to them, forcing others into a life of panting and catch-ups. Many happy returns.

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