Naija People go dey pay more money as MTN Nigeria don introduce charges on Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) voice or text message.
The telecom say dem go start to dey charge their subscribers dem from today, despite directive by the Federal Government not to do the plan.
MTN’s subscribers dem on Sunday receive messages from the company wey inform them say with effect from today, it will start charging them N4 per 20 seconds for USSD voice or N4 for text message.
Make Una read One of the messages from MTN :
‘’Yello, as requested by your bank, from Oct 21, we will start charging you directly for USSD access to banking services. Please contact your bank for more info.’’
Another message, :
“Yello, please note that from Oct 21, we will charge N4 per seconds for USSD access to banking services. Thank you.’’
But most of their customers react negatively to the new charge, and kon complain to the Minister of Communications Dr Isa Ali Panatmi via his twitter handle @DrIsaPantami, calling on the minister to rein in on MTN.
Dr Pantami answered one of them, say he don direct NCC to ask MTN to halt the planned charge.
‘’Many thanks for drawing my attention to it. We have directed NCC to ask MTN to suspend the plan.
“We are not aware of it officially. We will investigate and make sure right thing is done. Best wishes’’ .
Daily Trust report say a top official yarn say the telecom company go still go ahead to introduce the charge.
“Other telecom operators have been charging their customers for USSD before they could access their banks’ services; we are the last to introduce it.
“Bank Committees with the knowledge of CBN told us to charge the customers directly. Before it was the banks that deducted the whole charge, now it was agreed in a meeting with CBN knowledge that we should now charge N4 directly, and that the banks should charge their customers the rest.
“It should be N22: we charge N4 and they should deduct the remaining. But as it is now, the banks are still taking the whole N22.”
Meanwhile, the CBN has told banks to yank off businesses from telecommunication operators charging bank customers using USSD to make transactions.
The CBN Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele said this during a press briefing at the sidelines of the World Bank/IMF meetings in Washington DC.
He explained that “about five months ago, I held a meeting with some telecom companies as well as the leading banks in Nigeria and the issue of USSD came up.
“At that time, we came to conclusion that the use of USSD is a sunk cost which is not an additional cost on the infrastructure of the telecom companies.
“But the telecoms companies disagreed with us and said it’s an additional investment and they needed to impose it. I appeal to them that they should review it downwards and they refused’ he said.
Explaining further Mr. Emefiele said: “I understand that three or four weeks ago, rather than reduce it, they went ahead to increase it by 300 percent. I opposed it and I have told the banks that we will not allow this to happen.
“The banks are the people who give this business to the telecoms companies and I leave the banks and the telecom companies to engage.
“I have told the banks that they have to move their business, move their traffic to a telecom company that is ready to provide it at the lowest possible if not zero cost”. That’s where we stand and we must achieve it.’’
