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News Analysis
Information overload is the SMS
message center concept
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot
September 14, 2009
This idea for the “SMS message
center,” proposed by the Ghana government, is a waste; or, at
best, an opportunity for mobile phone operators to make money.
The SMS service(Short Message
Service) allows users of cell phones to send short text messages
to each other. It is a
commercially available service with no government intervention
in many places around the world.
“Commercially, SMS is a massive
industry in 2006 worth over 81 billion dollars globally. SMS has
an average global price of 0.11 USD while costing providers
almost nothing,” says Wikipedia.
In Ghana, the government, in
collaboration with phone companies, hopes to operate and receive
SMS messages for fees.
The fees aside, the government
says it wants to use the SMS service to hear directly from the
public. It reasons
that it will be a better approach to hear directly from the
public when things go wrong.
The irony is the grievances the
government wishes to hear are already aired daily on the
airwaves. Talk radio
stations, for instance, constantly receive SMS messages, which
they relay to the public.
Is it not enough to ask
Government to listen to these messages too? No
infrastructure is needed and the service provided will be
fitting for the broadcast licensing of these radio stations.
Instead, the government is in a
hurry to expand its services into SMS centers.
There are several negative
aspects of this government proposal that on their own would ask
for a pause on the project.
To begin with, this approach is a
very costly one to demand of the public.
Despite what has been said about
the cost of the project, we know that it is not going to be
free.
The cost will come out of
the pocket of citizens.
The same public that supports the
government with its taxes will have to pay the bill for each
message it texts to the government.
And the coffers of private mobile
phone companies will also be made rich by operating the SMS
service as proposed.
Why the government wants to
create a new market for private entities is still a mystery,
even with the reasons so far given.
And why none of the traditional
approaches of the past has satisfied the government’s thirst for
information on public grievances is a problem that needs to be
answered first before any novel approach is adopted.
Letters were written directly to
the government in the past about grievances in our communities.
Some of these same letters went
to our popular news journals.
And recently, Talk Radio is awash with these complaints.
Still amid this deluge, the
government wants to give authority to private phone companies to
create SMS centers.
These message centers are not
going to operate like the Post Office.
At least by buying postage, the average citizen knows
that the purchase goes to increase postal revenue which, in
turn, benefits government coffers.
But with the SMS centers, only a
cut of the revenue or the profit, as declared by the agents,
will come to the government.
Why must government give away a
huge portion of a part it can own entirely, if the need for the
service is real?
If there is the need for
government to hear efficiently grievances from the public
directly, there could be several ways of doing so without
creating an extra burden on the pocket of the general public.
The government could use the Multi-media
licensing approach.
For using the airwaves, the media
houses will be required to set up pipelines that bring back
grievance messages aired to the specific government bureaus.
The new licensing approach has a
distinct win-win advantage.
The media houses become waiting
rooms for government to hear grievances.
The media benefits because the exercise draws public
attention and audience interest.
The government wins because it
gets back free from the public grievances it presumably wants to
hear.
With a huge population base of
mostly functional illiterates, such as ours, this business model
can be rich and fertile for profit. Thus, the media houses
will not complain about the licensing requirement.
The attraction is there.
Some individuals, probably most with cell phones, may not be
able to resist the temptation to be “relevant” by being heard
talking directly to the government on the radio.
When set up properly, the media
houses will receive both text and voice messages.
Thus, the illiterates would be heard too.
The joy of call-ins is here
already. For those
without the time or patience to wait to be heard, texting will
be the perfect option.
And to add the government as the
listener at the other end will make the service readily
attractive.
But the enigma logged within all
the messaging will be how efficiently government responds to
these grievances.
Will the response be timely, immediate, or never?
The answer goes back to official
attitude and how the government has responded to many of these
same grievances made through other means; whether through
letters, broadcast media, or the daily journals.
Government response to all
matters in Ghana has been abysmal; be it to emergencies in
health or safety.
The senders of these messages can
barely hope that the messages will be read by the officials at
the receiving end.
These officials never do.
They have set up systems in their various official
enclaves that never respond with alacrity to any call or need.
A case in point is the activities
at the Land Department.
We have a backlog of cases of
grievances, some within the court system, that, with a little
informational clarity from the Lands Department filing system
can easily be cleared up within minutes.
Lost files, wrongly labeled ones
and those deliberately hidden for you know what purposes are all
part of the clogged system.
Imagine throwing into this muddle
text messaging papers or notes from the proposed SMS centers!
Under all this confusion, the
ignorance about what government needs to do to clear up the
system is made more obvious by the very government officials who
are now offering the message centers as a solution.
But for the private phone
companies who will operate the centers, the same situation
offers a business bonanza; perhaps an indication of why these
phone companies might have pushed the idea onto a willing
government official in the first place.
These phone companies will gladly
operate the SMS centers for as long as the public is willing to
pay the fees.
But the sad fact is the problems
that citizens will be grieving about and paying SMS services
fees to push for answers are already known – electricity
outages, lack of water in neighborhoods, inappropriate and
inadequate access to health services, and problems of their
collective nature.
The airwaves are already full of
these grievances.
But it has now been made clear by the proposal that the
government does not pay attention to many of these grievances.
And that its inability to solve whatever complaints it
has on hand daily has already been made manifest.
Then consider the addition of the
SMS center, where the input coming from text messages can be
vast.
It takes very little grievance to
generate responses from a number of our citizens.
Who will have the time at the receiving end to decipher
and read some of these messages that are likely to come in?
Huge, unseen, and unread by the
public, the messages sent can bring about other problems. They
may allow miscreants to spy and infringe on the liberties of
other fellow citizens.
And knowing the mentality of some
of our party bosses in government, the SMS messages received
from the precincts can be read as reasons for political
persecution and trigger vengeful investigations of political
opponents; a possibility that can be damaging to the general
citizenship.
All this for a service that is
proposed as a way to hear and resolve grievances direct from the
public. These it will not do.
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher
www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, September 14, 2009.
Permission to publish:
Please feel free to publish or reproduce, with
credits, unedited.
If posted on a website, email a copy of the web
page to publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at all.
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