International Reporting Project

Battle for Nigeria
Cell Phones in Nigeria

Part Three of Three

by June Thomas
Reprinted with permission of Slate.com

April 11, 2007

While eating dinner with the family of a retired civil servant in Abuja, our hosts used the dim light of a cell phone to locate precious family photographs they wanted to show us. The neighborhood's electricity was out, a daily occurrence, but when the house had power, charging the mobile was clearly a priority.

It's hard to hate cell phones in Nigeria. In a country where the crumbling infrastructure testifies to years of misdirected revenue and government neglect—inadequate electricity generation, only 20 percent of the nation's 50,000 miles of roads paved, a broken-down railway system—the story of mobile telephony is the rare success everyone celebrates. In 2000, there were just 400,000 phone lines in a land of 140 million people—now there are 2 million land lines and 31 million cell phones. The leap from phones being the exclusive province of the elite to an urban commonplace has affected almost every aspect of city life. Before the proliferation of mobile phones, making any kind of appointment required a personal visit—now Nigerians can wait on hold just like their Western counterparts. Scratch cards or "recharge cards"—pay-per-minute phone cards that are the most common way to buy air time—seem to be the product of choice for the entrepreneurs who weave through the treaclelike traffic. (Wouldn't you prefer to sell something the size and weight of a business card rather than lug food or drink around all day? And phone cards have a much longer shelf life than newspapers, another vendor favorite.)

Before dropping in on a classroom full of impossibly cute children at an Islamic school in the northern state of Kaduna, we sat on the impossibly hard floor of a mosque talking with teachers and religious leaders. From time to time, they would reach into the capacious pockets of their robes to silence—or to answer—cell phones. In Nigeria, there's no shame in having your phone ring in the middle of a meeting, even if it's held in a mosque. In fact, as in the case of one maroon-robed scholar whose ring tone was a clip from the call to prayer, it can help establish your religious devotion.

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