Nigerian political leaders and many of their institutions love big headlines and the vainer the real issues are, the more they hug it. It has almost become the expectation of discerning members of the public for public officials and institutions to sidestep serious issues of national social, moral, and economic importance in favour of vanity trips just because of how much headline news the media would make of it.

No one cares if, in the end, it makes them look stupid as long as big headlines are delivered, and this has become the preoccupation of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) of recent, particularly with its selective, almost morbid focus on Multichoice Nigeria. FCCPC, and at times, the National Assembly has been so consistent with their fruitless attention on Multichoice that you’ll begin to wonder if delivering free pay TV was an electoral promise. It is even beginning to look like stalking!

If not, how does one explain the trend where Multichoice would announce a pending price adjustment for their services in the morning only for the FCCPC to flood the newsrooms with aluta counter-press statements hours later? If this is not stalking, I wonder what else is.

Agencies of the Nigerian government have, in their desperation to impress the populace, willfully jumped into embarrassingly culpable faux pas particularly as it affects Multichoice. As far as the government is concerned, Multichoice and its bouquet of offerings have become the elusive democracy dividend promised since 1999. To them, since the real dividends have become pie in the sky, masquerading pay television was a sure way to sustain the opium injection with which politicians have relied to hold Nigerians captive.

Suppose the FCCPC has become a price control board, rather than the fair competition commission it was established to be. In that case, I guess they should tell us so and then we can begin to review everything backward, beginning with fuel prices, excise duties, and salaries of national assembly members; we will review everything so thoroughly we might revert to the days when a bus ride to Lagos from Onitsha cost less than N27, when a brand new Suzuki motorcycle cost N375, when a new Peugeot 504 GL was just N7,200, when a bottle of beer cost 72 kobo per bottle, liquid content only.

There is no denying the fact that DSTV, Multichoice’s baptismal name in this and many other markets in Africa, has provided a sort of escape illusion for many who are otherwise troubled by the perennial decadence the country has been for years. Politicians, in their serial failures, have realised that, for instance, a weekend of watching football games provides diversions that take attention away from governments’ failures. Those who cannot even afford the service would only need to buy themselves a bottle of beer in a beer palour where they would watch some games on Super Sport and the opium that would sustain them for some days is in.

Those who have developed the habit of placing bets on many of the matches played are guaranteed even deeper diversions. To these categories of people, the government has become the betting companies from whom the miracles of making bread out of stones are expected, or how else does one explain the ideas behind disillusioned folks placing bets with N100 and expecting to win N30 million?

For millions of Nigerians therefore, the hopes of becoming successful no longer rests on enabling and ennobling government policies, but rather on Multichoice which shows the games and betting companies that provide the platforms for the hopes that are renewable with as little as N100 all year round, as long as football matches are played in Europe, Asia, the Americas and increasingly, Africa.

The government knows this. They know that the more people are hallucinated by the opium DSTV and the betting companies, people will not be bothered about what they do. Even when surviving in Nigeria’s crushing economic maelstroms has become so fruitless, Nigerians, described by someone years ago as the happiest people on earth (apologies to Demos Shakarian, founder of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship), have a way of anchoring their hopes on something else that will make looking forward to a better tomorrow a worthy enterprise.

That is why, of all the important businesses of law-making confronting it, the Nigerian senate would find time to summon the management of Multichoice to explain to “Nigerians” why it would have the effrontery to increase the prices of its service offerings. That is why the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission would look away from the prices of petrol, which the government jerked up by more than 400 percent at one time, and continue to belabour the issue of whether a private business has the right to adjust the prices of its products based on the cost of inputs, the cost of energy (fuel) is number one factor. That is why the FCCPC will even go to court on behalf of the Nigerian people, to ensure that errant and unpatriotic pay TV service provider is forced to fix its prices at a level that would be affordable to all Nigerians.

This is happening in a country where the so-called ordinary Nigerians trek long distances to work because their earnings cannot afford the prohibitive transportation costs occasioned by increased fuel costs. It is happening in a country where even the middle class (or what remains of it) have been rationing the number of times they go out in their cars because of fuel costs. We are seeing this in a place where the young people who have been making ends meet via e-commerce can no longer afford the cost of data.

I think what government should do is nationalise Multichoice and make it a parastatal of the Ministry of Communications. That way, they can subsidise the services and make them free for all Nigerians who can afford television sets; they might even be so generous they would provide the dishes, decoders, and cables for every household.

I do not know who will explain FCCPC’s orbit so they understand once and for all what anti-competition means and what would be embarrassing for them to dive into.

By its very existence, the FCCPC should be concerned with issues that prevent businesses from engaging in practices that could lead to monopolies or reduce competition, ensuring a fair and open market.

First of all, the niche Multichoice is playing in is not an “open market.” On the contrary, Multichoice operates in the elite segment of the pay-TV market. To fill the gaps that still exist in the market, the company created GoTV, a vehicle that caters to the lower market demographic. In this segment exists (I do not know whether they are still there) Startimes. At present, there are a few others, including Silver Lake Television (SLTV).

Knowing all of these, why the fixation on Multichoice? Are they saying that businesses should become commoditized and avoid segmentation? I would want to believe that mischief is an important preoccupation of people in some of these places, and that is why I would ask them why they have not queried Eko Hotel in Lagos or Transcorp Hilton in Abuja for the hugely differentiated room and meal rates as compared to the competition?

As we speak, we still have NTA, AIT, Silverbird, and a host of other state-owned television stations to which interested Nigerians can connect to just by rigging an antenna behind their homes. I have never heard that Multichoice has ever prevented any of these from doing their business. Even when the last administration gave a lot of leverage to a new entrant in the market known as TsTV, Nigerians welcomed the opportunity to have another company compete with DSTV. That the company which everyone touted to give Multichoice soon the shake that would force it to cut its prices down did not fly and would never be blamed on Multichoice: if this happened, it is for the FCCPC to find out and punish the offender. This is the reason for which they were established. But where this wasn’t the case, I think they should stop embarrassing us with their student-union grade sloganeering.

Suppose the FCCPC has become a price control board, rather than the fair competition commission it was established to be. In that case, I guess they should tell us so and then we can begin to review everything backward, beginning with fuel prices, excise duties, and salaries of national assembly members; we will review everything so thoroughly we might revert to the days when a bus ride to Lagos from Onitsha cost less than N27, when a brand new Suzuki motorcycle cost N375, when a new Peugeot 504 GL was just N7,200, when a bottle of beer cost 72 kobo per bottle, liquid content only.