Customer service is supposed to help you resolve whatever issues you may have with a customer and potentially save you time, energy, and money. Unfortunately, customer service is sometimes designed to make you accept a bad product or service so that you don’t end up losing more than you already did.
We have all been there. And it does not matter what the service is, the experience is almost uniform; at the bank, at the telecom office, at the passport office, at the airline counter, at the hospital reception.
You walk in as a paying customer, and you are treated like a beggar asking for free rice at a politician’s rally. You are shuffled around, or worse ignored, insulted, lied to, and made to feel like you should be grateful they even acknowledged your existence.
Businesses have normalised treating paying customers like garbage and I am sick of it. I am concerned about this issue not just as a customer who wants full value for their money but also as an entrepreneur who wants the business ecosystem to be driven by excellence and not just an acceptance of “quality mediocrity”.
The ‘Take It or Leave It’ Mentality: Where Did This Come From?
According to a PwC survey on customer experience, 73% of consumers globally say customer experience is a key factor in their purchasing decisions. If customer experience is so important, why are businesses choosing to ignore it?
We live in a country where businesses seem to be actively punishing you for being their customer. Welcome to the anti-customer economy. To understand why Nigerian customer service is the way it is, you have to understand the psychology behind it. And that psychology is rooted in scarcity and a culture of deference to any semblance of authority.
For decades, Nigeria has operated as a scarcity-driven economy. There were not enough goods, not enough services, not enough infrastructure. When you are the only person selling bread in a village of five thousand hungry people, you do not need to smile or say ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’
That scarcity mindset never left. Even as the economy grew, even as competition entered certain sectors, the fundamental attitude of Nigerian business owners and their staff remained the same. The business believes they are doing you a favour by existing and the customer has simply learned to accept this dynamic as normal.
This mentality pervades every type of business across every sector. From the woman selling tomatoes at Mile 12 who will curse you out for asking for a discount, to the multinational bank that will make you wait three hours to resolve an error they created.
The attitude is the same: take it or leave it. And because Nigerians have been conditioned to take it, businesses have had zero incentive to change.
The Monopoly Effect: Why Competition Alone Cannot Fix This
The standard economic argument is that competition fixes customer service. When customers have choices, businesses that treat them poorly lose them to competitors that treat them better. This is a beautiful theory that works in countries with functional market structures. In Nigeria, it collapses for several reasons.
First, many sectors have oligopolies, not true competition. If there is one industry that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Nigerian customer service, it is telecommunications.
These companies have over 200 million subscribers combined, and they treat every single one of them like disposable waste. The Nigerian Communications Commission publishes subscriber data showing massive numbers, but nobody publishes the millions of hours Nigerians waste every year trying to get basic issues resolved with their network providers.
The telecom sector has four major players, all of whom provide equally terrible customer service. Switching from MTN to Airtel because of bad customer service is like jumping from a frying pan into a different frying pan. The pan is a slightly different colour, but the heat is exactly the same.
Banks? Same thing. There are over twenty commercial banks in Nigeria, and the customer service difference between them ranges from ‘bad’ to ‘slightly less bad.’ There is no bank that has genuinely cracked the code of consistent, excellent customer service across all touchpoints.
Second, switching costs are artificially high. Porting your phone number is a bureaucratic nightmare. Changing banks requires updating direct debits, salary accounts, BVN linkages, and a dozen other things that make the process so painful that most people simply endure the devil they know. These switching costs are not accidental. They are designed to trap customers in relationships they would otherwise leave.
Third, and this is the most important point, competition only drives better service when customers actually punish bad service by leaving. Nigerian customers have been so thoroughly beaten down by decades of terrible treatment that they have developed a form of learned helplessness. They do not expect good service. They do not demand it.
According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. Nigerian businesses have not internalized this data because they have never had to.
In an economy where customers do not leave, retention is free. And when retention is free, investing in customer service is seen as an unnecessary cost, not a competitive advantage.
Government Agencies: The Undisputed Champions of Anti-Customer Service
If Nigerian private sector customer service is bad, government agencies are on a different level entirely. The undefeated champions of terrible service delivery. At least with a private business, there is a theoretical possibility that a competitor could emerge and steal their customers. With government agencies, you have no choice.
You cannot get your passport from a private company. You cannot register your business with an alternative CAC. You cannot get your driver’s license from a competitor. They have a monopoly on the services you need. They know it and they behave accordingly.
The Nigeria Immigration Service passport application process is a masterclass in institutional contempt for citizens. You pay online, you book an appointment, you show up on time, and then you discover that ‘appointment’ is a suggestion, not a commitment. You will wait.
You will be shuffled between desks. You will be asked for documents that were not listed in the requirements. You will be told to come back. And when you return, a different officer will tell you that the document you were told to bring is actually not needed, but you need a different one instead.
This is not bureaucracy. This is psychological warfare against citizens. Eventually, you will succumb to the demand or a bribe to ease the process. That was the end game all along. Public service institutions serve themselves and the public is merely the inconvenience they have to tolerate between tea breaks.
At many government offices, you cannot enter without ‘knowing somebody’ or paying an unofficial facilitation fee. Documents get ‘lost’ with suspicious regularity, requiring you to start processes from scratch. The concept of an appointment is decorative at best. Digital platforms are launched with fanfare and abandoned within months, forcing people back to manual processes
Nigerians are forced to engage with these agencies, and they are forced to endure whatever treatment they receive because there is no alternative. This captive-audience dynamic is the purest form of the anti-customer economy. You are not a customer. You are a hostage.
The Training Gap: Nobody Taught Them, Nobody Checked
Here is a question I want you to genuinely consider: how many Nigerian businesses, across all sectors, have a formal, structured, ongoing customer service training programme? Not a one-day orientation where a bored HR person reads from a PowerPoint.
I mean a real programme. With regular sessions. With performance metrics. With consequences for poor service delivery. With mystery shoppers and customer feedback loops and continuous improvement frameworks. My estimate? Less than five percent. And I am being generous.
Most Nigerian businesses hire people for customer-facing roles and then throw them at customers with zero preparation. The staff member brings whatever interpersonal skills they happened to develop growing up, which in a country where aggression is often mistaken for assertiveness, means they bring the exact wrong energy to customer interactions.
The service industry globally is built on a foundation of training. The International Customer Service Association and organisations like it produce frameworks and certifications that businesses worldwide use to build customer service excellence. In Nigeria, these frameworks exist in a theoretical space.
And it is not just about front-line staff. The problem goes all the way to the top. Nigerian business owners and managers often share the same contemptuous attitude towards customers as their staff. Fish rots from the head.
When the CEO does not prioritize customer experience, when the board does not measure customer satisfaction, when the performance review system does not include service delivery metrics, why would any staff member on the front line bother being pleasant? They are not incentivized to care. They are often not even equipped to care.
Social Media Shaming: The Only Weapon That Actually Works
In the absence of functional regulatory bodies, effective competition, and institutional accountability, Nigerians have discovered one tool that actually gets results: public shame. Twitter, now X, has become the unofficial customer service resolution platform for the entire country.
When your bank ignores your complaint for weeks, you take it to Twitter. When your telecom provider steals your data, you take it to Twitter. When an airline cancels your flight and offers no compensation, you take it to Twitter.
And miraculously, the same companies that could not find your complaint in their system for three months will respond within thirty minutes when you tag them in a tweet that is going viral.
This is deeply dysfunctional. It means that the quality of customer service you receive is directly proportional to the size of your social media following. If you have fifty thousand followers, your complaint gets resolved in hours. If you have fifty followers, your complaint gets filed in the trash. This is not customer service. This is reputation management disguised as customer service.
Companies now employ ‘social media response teams’ whose sole job is monitoring brand mentions and putting out fires. The best customer service in Nigeria often comes not from the service department but from the social media team.
Some Nigerians have started offering ‘tweet on your behalf’ services, essentially becoming customer service mercenaries. The disparity between social media response times and official channel response times is staggering, often minutes vs weeks.
But this model is not sustainable, and it is not fair. Not everyone is on social media. Not everyone knows how to craft a compelling thread. Not everyone has the time or energy or even just the will to wage a public campaign just to get a refund for a service that was never delivered.
The Businesses That Got It Right: Proof That It Is Possible
Before you accuse me of being entirely negative, let me acknowledge that there are Nigerian businesses that have figured out customer service. They exist. They are rare, but they exist. And they are worth studying because they prove that the anti-customer economy is not an inevitable law of nature. It is a choice.
Look at what companies like Flutterwave and Paystack did in the fintech space. They entered a market dominated by banks that treated digital payments like an afterthought and built products with customer experience at the centre.
Paystack’s developer documentation became a benchmark not because their technology was light-years ahead, but because they actually bothered to make it easy for customers to use. They responded to support tickets. They built clear, intuitive interfaces.
They treated their users like human beings. And the market rewarded them with explosive growth and eventual acquisition by Stripe. Some restaurants and hospitality businesses have also cracked the code.
Places that have realised that in a market where everyone is terrible at service, being merely decent gives you a massive competitive advantage. You do not need to be world-class. You just need to be noticeably, consistently, reliably not terrible. That bar is so low that anyone who clears it looks like a genius.
The Economics of Good Customer Service: Money on the Table
Here is what drives me insane about the anti-customer economy: it is economically irrational. Nigerian businesses are leaving massive amounts of money on the table by providing terrible customer service.
They think they are saving money by underinvesting in service, but they are actually bleeding revenue through customer churn, negative word of mouth, and missed upselling opportunities.
The data on this is overwhelming and unambiguous. According to Bain & Company research, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%. That is not a small margin. That is transformational.
The cost of acquiring a new customer in Nigeria’s competitive or do I say pseudo-competitive sectors is significant. Telecoms spend billions on advertising, promotions, and subsidised handsets to acquire subscribers. Then they treat those subscribers so badly that they churn within eighteen months, forcing the company to spend more billions acquiring replacements.
If they redirected even a fraction of their acquisition budget to retention through better service, they would be more profitable. A satisfied customer in Nigeria tells an average of 3-5 people about a positive experience. A dissatisfied customer tells an average of 15-20 people about a negative experience.
One viral negative experience on social media can cost a company more in brand damage than a decade of customer service investment. You cannot love profit and hate customers. They are the same thing.
Building a Customer-First Business in an Anti-Customer Economy
The point has been made that customer service in our market is extremely poor and that means there is an opportunity for entrepreneurs who are building customer-centric businesses to dominate the market.
So what would it actually take to build a customer-first business in Nigeria? Not in theory. In practice. On the ground. In this economy. With these people. With these constraints. Here is my framework, built from observation, experience, and conversations with the few Nigerian business owners who have actually figured this out.
- Start with hiring: Stop hiring people for customer-facing roles based solely on their qualifications on paper. Start testing for empathy, communication skills, and emotional intelligence. Your recruitment process should include scenarios, role-plays, and personality assessments that specifically measure customer orientation.
- Invest in training: Invest in training. Not once. Not at orientation. Continuously. Consistently. Build a training calendar that covers de-escalation, active listening, problem resolution, product knowledge, and communication skills. Bring in external trainers. Send your best staff to conferences. Create a library of case studies from your own business showing good and bad service examples. Make training a core part of the job, not an afterthought.
- Measure what matters: You get what you measure. If your performance metrics are purely about transactions processed, that is what your staff will optimise for. Add customer satisfaction scores, resolution times, complaint ratios, and Net Promoter Scores to your performance dashboard. Make these metrics matter in performance reviews, promotions, and bonuses.
- Empower your front line: One of the biggest customer service failures in Nigeria is that front-line staff have zero authority. They cannot make any decision that deviates from the rigid script they have been given. This creates bottlenecks, delays, and frustration. Give your front-line staff the authority to resolve common issues on the spot, within defined parameters. Trust them. And if you cannot trust them, you hired the wrong people.
- Build feedback loops: Create multiple channels for customers to give feedback, and actually act on the feedback. Build a real system. Assign someone to own it. Review feedback weekly. Identify patterns. Fix systemic issues. Close the loop by telling customers what you did with their feedback.
- Lead from the front: The CEO, the MD, the founder needs to be visibly, vocally, consistently obsessed with customer experience. Not just in town halls and memos, in action. Sit in the banking hall. Listen to call centre recordings. Read complaint emails. When the boss cares, everyone cares. When the boss does not care, no amount of training or metrics will change the culture.
These are not revolutionary ideas and they are not prohibitively expensive either. This is Customer Service 101. The fact that it would be revolutionary in Nigeria tells you how far behind we are.
The Anti-Customer Economy Has an Expiry Date
The anti-customer economy has an expiry date. As Nigeria’s economy evolves, as digital platforms increase transparency, as social media continues to amplify consumer voices, as a new generation of business owners who have experienced world-class service abroad returns home with different expectations, things will change.
And in some pockets, they are changing. Slowly. Inconsistently. Unevenly. But changing. I am not naive. I know this will not change overnight. I know the structural incentives that maintain the anti-customer economy are deep and entrenched. But I also know that every empire of mediocrity eventually falls when something better comes along. And something better is coming.
Also, when there is no institutional mechanism to back up genuine concerns, demanding better service is treated as smear campaigns. Organisations like the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) need to be strengthened, funded, and given real teeth to enforce standards.
Until that day comes, I will continue to do what every Nigerian does. I will stand in the queue. I will call the customer care line. I will navigate the bureaucracy. I will write the formal complaint. And when all else fails, I will compose that Twitter thread because in this country, that is the customer service system that actually works.
August 8, 2026
10 minute
Isreal Oyarinde
Why Nigerian Customer Service Is an Oxymoron: The Anti-Customer Economy
Table of Contents
Customer service is supposed to help you resolve whatever issues you may have with a customer and potentially save you time, energy, and money. Unfortunately, customer service is sometimes designed to make you accept a bad product or service so that you don’t end up losing more than you already did.
We have all been there. And it does not matter what the service is, the experience is almost uniform; at the bank, at the telecom office, at the passport office, at the airline counter, at the hospital reception.
You walk in as a paying customer, and you are treated like a beggar asking for free rice at a politician’s rally. You are shuffled around, or worse ignored, insulted, lied to, and made to feel like you should be grateful they even acknowledged your existence.
Businesses have normalised treating paying customers like garbage and I am sick of it. I am concerned about this issue not just as a customer who wants full value for their money but also as an entrepreneur who wants the business ecosystem to be driven by excellence and not just an acceptance of “quality mediocrity”.
The ‘Take It or Leave It’ Mentality: Where Did This Come From?
According to a PwC survey on customer experience, 73% of consumers globally say customer experience is a key factor in their purchasing decisions. If customer experience is so important, why are businesses choosing to ignore it?
We live in a country where businesses seem to be actively punishing you for being their customer. Welcome to the anti-customer economy. To understand why Nigerian customer service is the way it is, you have to understand the psychology behind it. And that psychology is rooted in scarcity and a culture of deference to any semblance of authority.
For decades, Nigeria has operated as a scarcity-driven economy. There were not enough goods, not enough services, not enough infrastructure. When you are the only person selling bread in a village of five thousand hungry people, you do not need to smile or say ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’
That scarcity mindset never left. Even as the economy grew, even as competition entered certain sectors, the fundamental attitude of Nigerian business owners and their staff remained the same. The business believes they are doing you a favour by existing and the customer has simply learned to accept this dynamic as normal.
This mentality pervades every type of business across every sector. From the woman selling tomatoes at Mile 12 who will curse you out for asking for a discount, to the multinational bank that will make you wait three hours to resolve an error they created.
The attitude is the same: take it or leave it. And because Nigerians have been conditioned to take it, businesses have had zero incentive to change.
The Monopoly Effect: Why Competition Alone Cannot Fix This
The standard economic argument is that competition fixes customer service. When customers have choices, businesses that treat them poorly lose them to competitors that treat them better. This is a beautiful theory that works in countries with functional market structures. In Nigeria, it collapses for several reasons.
First, many sectors have oligopolies, not true competition. If there is one industry that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Nigerian customer service, it is telecommunications.
These companies have over 200 million subscribers combined, and they treat every single one of them like disposable waste. The Nigerian Communications Commission publishes subscriber data showing massive numbers, but nobody publishes the millions of hours Nigerians waste every year trying to get basic issues resolved with their network providers.
The telecom sector has four major players, all of whom provide equally terrible customer service. Switching from MTN to Airtel because of bad customer service is like jumping from a frying pan into a different frying pan. The pan is a slightly different colour, but the heat is exactly the same.
Banks? Same thing. There are over twenty commercial banks in Nigeria, and the customer service difference between them ranges from ‘bad’ to ‘slightly less bad.’ There is no bank that has genuinely cracked the code of consistent, excellent customer service across all touchpoints.
Second, switching costs are artificially high. Porting your phone number is a bureaucratic nightmare. Changing banks requires updating direct debits, salary accounts, BVN linkages, and a dozen other things that make the process so painful that most people simply endure the devil they know. These switching costs are not accidental. They are designed to trap customers in relationships they would otherwise leave.
Third, and this is the most important point, competition only drives better service when customers actually punish bad service by leaving. Nigerian customers have been so thoroughly beaten down by decades of terrible treatment that they have developed a form of learned helplessness. They do not expect good service. They do not demand it.
According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. Nigerian businesses have not internalized this data because they have never had to.
In an economy where customers do not leave, retention is free. And when retention is free, investing in customer service is seen as an unnecessary cost, not a competitive advantage.
Government Agencies: The Undisputed Champions of Anti-Customer Service
If Nigerian private sector customer service is bad, government agencies are on a different level entirely. The undefeated champions of terrible service delivery. At least with a private business, there is a theoretical possibility that a competitor could emerge and steal their customers. With government agencies, you have no choice.
You cannot get your passport from a private company. You cannot register your business with an alternative CAC. You cannot get your driver’s license from a competitor. They have a monopoly on the services you need. They know it and they behave accordingly.
The Nigeria Immigration Service passport application process is a masterclass in institutional contempt for citizens. You pay online, you book an appointment, you show up on time, and then you discover that ‘appointment’ is a suggestion, not a commitment. You will wait.
You will be shuffled between desks. You will be asked for documents that were not listed in the requirements. You will be told to come back. And when you return, a different officer will tell you that the document you were told to bring is actually not needed, but you need a different one instead.
This is not bureaucracy. This is psychological warfare against citizens. Eventually, you will succumb to the demand or a bribe to ease the process. That was the end game all along. Public service institutions serve themselves and the public is merely the inconvenience they have to tolerate between tea breaks.
At many government offices, you cannot enter without ‘knowing somebody’ or paying an unofficial facilitation fee. Documents get ‘lost’ with suspicious regularity, requiring you to start processes from scratch. The concept of an appointment is decorative at best. Digital platforms are launched with fanfare and abandoned within months, forcing people back to manual processes
Nigerians are forced to engage with these agencies, and they are forced to endure whatever treatment they receive because there is no alternative. This captive-audience dynamic is the purest form of the anti-customer economy. You are not a customer. You are a hostage.
The Training Gap: Nobody Taught Them, Nobody Checked
Here is a question I want you to genuinely consider: how many Nigerian businesses, across all sectors, have a formal, structured, ongoing customer service training programme? Not a one-day orientation where a bored HR person reads from a PowerPoint.
I mean a real programme. With regular sessions. With performance metrics. With consequences for poor service delivery. With mystery shoppers and customer feedback loops and continuous improvement frameworks. My estimate? Less than five percent. And I am being generous.
Most Nigerian businesses hire people for customer-facing roles and then throw them at customers with zero preparation. The staff member brings whatever interpersonal skills they happened to develop growing up, which in a country where aggression is often mistaken for assertiveness, means they bring the exact wrong energy to customer interactions.
The service industry globally is built on a foundation of training. The International Customer Service Association and organisations like it produce frameworks and certifications that businesses worldwide use to build customer service excellence. In Nigeria, these frameworks exist in a theoretical space.
And it is not just about front-line staff. The problem goes all the way to the top. Nigerian business owners and managers often share the same contemptuous attitude towards customers as their staff. Fish rots from the head.
When the CEO does not prioritize customer experience, when the board does not measure customer satisfaction, when the performance review system does not include service delivery metrics, why would any staff member on the front line bother being pleasant? They are not incentivized to care. They are often not even equipped to care.
Social Media Shaming: The Only Weapon That Actually Works
In the absence of functional regulatory bodies, effective competition, and institutional accountability, Nigerians have discovered one tool that actually gets results: public shame. Twitter, now X, has become the unofficial customer service resolution platform for the entire country.
When your bank ignores your complaint for weeks, you take it to Twitter. When your telecom provider steals your data, you take it to Twitter. When an airline cancels your flight and offers no compensation, you take it to Twitter.
And miraculously, the same companies that could not find your complaint in their system for three months will respond within thirty minutes when you tag them in a tweet that is going viral.
This is deeply dysfunctional. It means that the quality of customer service you receive is directly proportional to the size of your social media following. If you have fifty thousand followers, your complaint gets resolved in hours. If you have fifty followers, your complaint gets filed in the trash. This is not customer service. This is reputation management disguised as customer service.
Companies now employ ‘social media response teams’ whose sole job is monitoring brand mentions and putting out fires. The best customer service in Nigeria often comes not from the service department but from the social media team.
Some Nigerians have started offering ‘tweet on your behalf’ services, essentially becoming customer service mercenaries. The disparity between social media response times and official channel response times is staggering, often minutes vs weeks.
But this model is not sustainable, and it is not fair. Not everyone is on social media. Not everyone knows how to craft a compelling thread. Not everyone has the time or energy or even just the will to wage a public campaign just to get a refund for a service that was never delivered.
The Businesses That Got It Right: Proof That It Is Possible
Before you accuse me of being entirely negative, let me acknowledge that there are Nigerian businesses that have figured out customer service. They exist. They are rare, but they exist. And they are worth studying because they prove that the anti-customer economy is not an inevitable law of nature. It is a choice.
Look at what companies like Flutterwave and Paystack did in the fintech space. They entered a market dominated by banks that treated digital payments like an afterthought and built products with customer experience at the centre.
Paystack’s developer documentation became a benchmark not because their technology was light-years ahead, but because they actually bothered to make it easy for customers to use. They responded to support tickets. They built clear, intuitive interfaces.
They treated their users like human beings. And the market rewarded them with explosive growth and eventual acquisition by Stripe. Some restaurants and hospitality businesses have also cracked the code.
Places that have realised that in a market where everyone is terrible at service, being merely decent gives you a massive competitive advantage. You do not need to be world-class. You just need to be noticeably, consistently, reliably not terrible. That bar is so low that anyone who clears it looks like a genius.
The Economics of Good Customer Service: Money on the Table
Here is what drives me insane about the anti-customer economy: it is economically irrational. Nigerian businesses are leaving massive amounts of money on the table by providing terrible customer service.
They think they are saving money by underinvesting in service, but they are actually bleeding revenue through customer churn, negative word of mouth, and missed upselling opportunities.
The data on this is overwhelming and unambiguous. According to Bain & Company research, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%. That is not a small margin. That is transformational.
The cost of acquiring a new customer in Nigeria’s competitive or do I say pseudo-competitive sectors is significant. Telecoms spend billions on advertising, promotions, and subsidised handsets to acquire subscribers. Then they treat those subscribers so badly that they churn within eighteen months, forcing the company to spend more billions acquiring replacements.
If they redirected even a fraction of their acquisition budget to retention through better service, they would be more profitable. A satisfied customer in Nigeria tells an average of 3-5 people about a positive experience. A dissatisfied customer tells an average of 15-20 people about a negative experience.
One viral negative experience on social media can cost a company more in brand damage than a decade of customer service investment. You cannot love profit and hate customers. They are the same thing.
Building a Customer-First Business in an Anti-Customer Economy
The point has been made that customer service in our market is extremely poor and that means there is an opportunity for entrepreneurs who are building customer-centric businesses to dominate the market.
So what would it actually take to build a customer-first business in Nigeria? Not in theory. In practice. On the ground. In this economy. With these people. With these constraints. Here is my framework, built from observation, experience, and conversations with the few Nigerian business owners who have actually figured this out.
These are not revolutionary ideas and they are not prohibitively expensive either. This is Customer Service 101. The fact that it would be revolutionary in Nigeria tells you how far behind we are.
The Anti-Customer Economy Has an Expiry Date
The anti-customer economy has an expiry date. As Nigeria’s economy evolves, as digital platforms increase transparency, as social media continues to amplify consumer voices, as a new generation of business owners who have experienced world-class service abroad returns home with different expectations, things will change.
And in some pockets, they are changing. Slowly. Inconsistently. Unevenly. But changing. I am not naive. I know this will not change overnight. I know the structural incentives that maintain the anti-customer economy are deep and entrenched. But I also know that every empire of mediocrity eventually falls when something better comes along. And something better is coming.
Also, when there is no institutional mechanism to back up genuine concerns, demanding better service is treated as smear campaigns. Organisations like the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) need to be strengthened, funded, and given real teeth to enforce standards.
Until that day comes, I will continue to do what every Nigerian does. I will stand in the queue. I will call the customer care line. I will navigate the bureaucracy. I will write the formal complaint. And when all else fails, I will compose that Twitter thread because in this country, that is the customer service system that actually works.
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August 8, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
Why Nigerian Customer Service Is an Oxymoron: The Anti-Customer Economy
Customer service is supposed to help you resolve whatever issues you may have with a customer and potentially save you time, energy, and money. Unfortunately, customer service is sometimes designed to make you accept a bad product or service so that you don’t end up losing more than you already did. We have all been there. And it does not matter what the service is, the experience is almost uniform; at the bank, at the telecom office, at the passport office, at the airline counter, at the hospital reception. You walk in as a paying customer, and you are treated like a beggar asking for free rice at a politician’s rally. You are shuffled around, or worse ignored, insulted, lied to, and made to feel like you should be grateful they even acknowledged your existence. Businesses have normalised treating paying customers like garbage and I am sick of it. I am concerned about this issue not just as a customer who wants full value for their money but also as an entrepreneur who wants the business ecosystem to be driven by excellence and not just an acceptance of “quality mediocrity”. The ‘Take It or Leave It’ Mentality: Where Did This Come From? According to a PwC survey on customer experience, 73% of consumers globally say customer experience is a key factor in their purchasing decisions. If customer experience is so important, why are businesses choosing to ignore it? We live in a country where businesses seem to be actively punishing you for being their customer. Welcome to the anti-customer economy. To understand why Nigerian customer service is the way it is, you have to understand the psychology behind it. And that psychology is rooted in scarcity and a culture of deference to any semblance of authority. For decades, Nigeria has operated as a scarcity-driven economy. There were not enough goods, not enough services, not enough infrastructure. When you are the only person selling bread in a village of five thousand hungry people, you do not need to smile or say ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’ That scarcity mindset never left. Even as the economy grew, even as competition entered certain sectors, the fundamental attitude of Nigerian business owners and their staff remained the same. The business believes they are doing you a favour by existing and the customer has simply learned to accept this dynamic as normal. This mentality pervades every type of business across every sector. From the woman selling tomatoes at Mile 12 who will curse you out for asking for a discount, to the multinational bank that will make you wait three hours to resolve an error they created. The attitude is the same: take it or leave it. And because Nigerians have been conditioned to take it, businesses have had zero incentive to change. The Monopoly Effect: Why Competition Alone Cannot Fix This The standard economic argument is that competition fixes customer service. When customers have choices, businesses that treat them poorly lose them to competitors that treat them better. This is a beautiful theory that works in countries with functional market structures. In Nigeria, it collapses for several reasons. First, many sectors have oligopolies, not true competition. If there is one industry that perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Nigerian customer service, it is telecommunications. These companies have over 200 million subscribers combined, and they treat every single one of them like disposable waste. The Nigerian Communications Commission publishes subscriber data showing massive numbers, but nobody publishes the millions of hours Nigerians waste every year trying to get basic issues resolved with their network providers. The telecom sector has four major players, all of whom provide equally terrible customer service. Switching from MTN to Airtel because of bad customer service is like jumping from a frying pan into a different frying pan. The pan is a slightly different colour, but the heat is exactly the same. Banks? Same thing. There are over twenty commercial banks in Nigeria, and the customer service difference between them ranges from ‘bad’ to ‘slightly less bad.’ There is no bank that has genuinely cracked the code of consistent, excellent customer service across all touchpoints. Second, switching costs are artificially high. Porting your phone number is a bureaucratic nightmare. Changing banks requires updating direct debits, salary accounts, BVN linkages, and a dozen other things that make the process so painful that most people simply endure the devil they know. These switching costs are not accidental. They are designed to trap customers in relationships they would otherwise leave. Third, and this is the most important point, competition only drives better service when customers actually punish bad service by leaving. Nigerian customers have been so thoroughly beaten down by decades of terrible treatment that they have developed a form of learned helplessness. They do not expect good service. They do not demand it. According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than retaining an existing one. Nigerian businesses have not internalized this data because they have never had to. In an economy where customers do not leave, retention is free. And when retention is free, investing in customer service is seen as an unnecessary cost, not a competitive advantage. Government Agencies: The Undisputed Champions of Anti-Customer Service If Nigerian private sector customer service is bad, government agencies are on a different level entirely. The undefeated champions of terrible service delivery. At least with a private business, there is a theoretical possibility that a competitor could emerge and steal their customers. With government agencies, you have no choice. You cannot get your passport from a private company. You cannot register your business with an alternative CAC. You cannot get your driver’s license from a competitor. They have a monopoly on the services you need. They know it and they behave accordingly. The Nigeria Immigration Service passport application process is a masterclass in institutional contempt for citizens. You pay online, you book an appointment, you show up on time,
July 27, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
The Reputational Cost of Yahoo Yahoo: How Cybercrime Destroyed Nigeria’s Brand
I have spent my entire career building legitimate businesses, paying taxes, following rules, and yet I get treated like a suspect because of where I was born and the colour of my passport. The Nigerian passport means potential fraud risk. That is the global assumption. That is what yahoo yahoo has done to us. For those who are not familiar with Nigerian slang. Yahoo yahoo is the colloquial term for internet fraud. 419 scams, romance scams, business email compromise, and every other form of cybercrime that has become associated with Nigeria. The damage to Nigeria’s reputation has only gotten worse over the years despite repeated crackdowns on suspected cyber criminals. This is not an essay about the morality of cybercrime. Of course, it is wrong. Of course it is theft. That should go without saying. What I want to talk about is something that gets less attention. The enormous ongoing economic cost that cybercrime has imposed on every single Nigerian, including the overwhelming majority who have never scammed anyone. Yahoo yahoo has not just stolen money from foreign victims. It has stolen opportunity from every honest Nigerian trying to do business in the global economy. The Brand Is Broken Let me start with a concept from business: brand equity. A brand is not just a logo or a name. It is a set of associations that people carry in their minds. When you hear Swiss, you think precision, quality, reliability. When you hear Japanese, you think innovation, efficiency, discipline. When you hear Nigerian… you think scam. This reputational damage did not happen overnight. It was built, email by email, scam by scam, over three decades. From the 419 letters of the 1990s to the sophisticated business email compromise schemes of the 2020s, Nigerian cybercriminals have systematically destroyed the country’s brand and the rest of us are paying the price. I have heard young Nigerians argue that yahoo is a response to a failed system, that the government has failed them and they are just surviving. I understand the frustration. I understand the sapa. But let me be blunt: every naira a yahoo boy steals costs the rest of us a thousand naira in lost opportunity. You are robbing your fellow Nigerians the ability to participate in the global economy without suspicion, without extra scrutiny, without being treated like criminals. Visa Rejections and Travel Bans The most visible cost of Nigeria’s fraud reputation is in visa processing. Nigerian passport holders face some of the most stringent visa requirements in the world. Most countries require Nigerians to go through lengthy, expensive, and humiliating visa application processes. The refusal rate for Nigerian visa applications to many western countries is among the highest for any nationality. I know of doctors, engineers, professors, and business executives who have been denied visas despite having impeccable credentials, strong ties to Nigeria, and no reason whatsoever to overstay or commit fraud. The denial letters are always vague but everyone knows the real reason. The Nigerian passport carries a stigma that no amount of documentation can fully overcome. There are numerous cases of accomplished Nigerians being denied visas for conferences, medical treatment, and business meetings. The japa phenomenon has made this worse. As more Nigerians leave the country, immigration authorities in destination countries have become even more suspicious of Nigerian applicants. The logic, unfair as it is, goes like this: Nigerians are likely to overstay their visas, and some Nigerians are involved in fraud, therefore every Nigerian applicant deserves maximum scrutiny. This creates a vicious cycle. Legitimate travellers are denied visas, which encourages people to use irregular channels, which further damages the reputation, which leads to more denials. The economic cost of visa restrictions is enormous. Nigerian businesses that could be doing deals in Europe and America are instead confined to the African market because their executives cannot travel freely. Conferences and trade fairs that could bring Nigerian innovations to the world stage are attended by smaller delegations because half the delegates were denied visas. Academic collaborations are disrupted. Medical treatment abroad becomes inaccessible. Family relationships are strained. All these because a relatively small number of our countrymen decided that stealing was easier than working. Bank Account Closures: The Financial Exile If visa rejections are the visible wound, bank account closures are the silent killer. Over the past decade, international banks have been closing accounts held by Nigerians and Nigerian businesses. This process, called de-risking, is driven by anti-money laundering regulations that make it expensive and risky for banks to maintain relationships with customers from high-risk jurisdictions. These banks are making a rational calculation: the cost of monitoring Nigerian accounts for potential fraud exceeds the revenue those accounts generate. So they close them. And every time a Nigerian account is closed, it becomes slightly harder for the next Nigerian business to open one. The reputation spiral tightens. This has real consequences for trade. Nigerian importers who cannot maintain foreign bank accounts must go through intermediaries, which adds cost. Nigerian exporters who cannot receive direct payments must use complex routing arrangements. Nigerian students abroad struggle to receive funds from home. Nigerians in the diaspora face increasing difficulty sending remittances back. The financial system that connects Nigeria to the global economy is being slowly strangled by the reputational damage caused by cybercrime. And here is the darkest irony: as formal banking channels are closed, money moves to informal channels. Hawala networks, cryptocurrency, cash carriers. These informal channels are less transparent, harder to regulate, and more vulnerable to exploitation by the very criminals whose activities caused the formal channels to close in the first place. We are creating a self-reinforcing cycle of exclusion and opacity. It is absolute madness. The Cost to Legitimate Tech Nigeria has one of the most vibrant tech ecosystems in Africa. Lagos is home to hundreds of tech businesses at varying stages of growth. Nigerian developers are building world-class products. Fintech companies born in Lagos are processing billions in transactions across Africa. This is a genuine success
June 16, 2026
Isreal Oyarinde
The Nigerian Data Problem: We Don’t Know How Many We Are, Where We Live, or What We Earn
In God we trust, all others bring data. – W. Edwards Deming In 2023, I was working on a business plan for a client who wanted to launch a logistics company in Kano State. Simple enough, right? Except it wasn’t. We needed basic data. The population of Kano metropolitan area, number of registered businesses, average household income, road network coverage, number of delivery addresses and that is where it became a nightmare. You would think this information would be readily available for the most populous state in Nigeria. You would be wrong. The population figure we found ranged from 9 million to 16 million depending on which source you used. The Natonal Bureau of Statistics had one number, the state government had another. The UN population estimates had a third. The World Bank used yet another figure. And the last actual census was in 2006, nearly two decades ago, when the Kano population was counted at about 9.4 million. In a state growing at maybe 3 percent annually, the current population could be anything. We were literally guessing and our guesses were not even informed by any reliable data. The number of registered businesses? No comprehensive database exists. Average household income? The NBS does household surveys, but the sample sizes are small, the methodology is questionable, and the data is years out of date by the time it is published. Road network coverage? I called three different agencies and got three completely different answers. Number of delivery addresses? Nigeria does not have a functional address system. Most streets in Kano do not have names. Most houses do not have numbers. How do you run a delivery company in a country where you cannot describe where people live? That experience crystallized something I had been thinking about for years. Nigeria does not have a data problem, Nigeria has a data crisis. We are running a country of over 200 million people essentially blind. We do not know how many we are. We do not know where we live. We do not know what we earn. We do not know what we produce. We do not know what we consume. And because we do not know any of this, every policy decision is a guess, every budget is fiction, and every business projection is built on vibes and In Sha Allah. This is not a minor administrative inconvenience. This is a fundamental governance failure that affects every aspect of Nigerian life, from healthcare to education to infrastructure to security. You cannot solve problems you cannot measure. You cannot allocate resources to populations you cannot count. You cannot plan for a future you cannot model. And yet here we are, the giant of Africa, stumbling around in the dark because we refuse to turn on the light. The Census Catastrophe Let us start with the most basic data point of all. How many Nigerians are there? The honest answer is nobody knows. Nigeria’s last census was in 2006. It counted 140 million people, a number that was immediately controversial. Northern states claimed they were undercounted. Southern states claimed the north was overcounted. Ethnic groups accused each other of inflating numbers for political advantage. The census became not a statistical exercise but a political weapon, because in Nigeria, population determines revenue allocation, political representation, and power. The 2006 census itself was riddled with problems. Enumerators were poorly trained. Some areas were inaccessible due to security concerns. The technology was outdated. There were widespread allegations of manipulation. The results were challenged in court by several states. And yet, nearly twenty years later, this deeply flawed count remains the official basis for planning in Africa largest economy. The World Bank and the UN use projections based on this flawed baseline, which means their estimates are also unreliable. A new census has been planned, postponed, replanned, and re-postponed multiple times. The National Population Commission has been promising a new census for over a decade. Each time, the exercise is derailed by political disagreements, funding shortfalls, or security concerns. Meanwhile, the gap between our population estimates and reality grows wider every year. Are we 210 million? 220 million? 230 million? Nobody can say with confidence, and the margin of error is not a few percentage points but potentially tens of millions of people. The political dimension of the census cannot be overstated. In Nigeria, population is money and power. Federal revenue allocation is partly based on population. States with larger populations get more money. The number of House of Representatives seats is based on population. So every census becomes a high-stakes political battle. Until we can decouple the census from resource allocation, or find some way to make the count politically neutral, we will continue to fight over numbers instead of collecting them. NBS and the Methodology Problem The National Bureau of Statistics is supposed to be the authoritative source of data on the Nigerian economy and society. In fairness, the NBS does important work with limited resources. But the limitations are severe, and they undermine the reliability of virtually everything the NBS publishes. Take the unemployment figure for example. For years, the NBS reported Nigeria’s unemployment rate as being in the low single digits, which was laughable to anyone who had walked through any Nigerian city and seen the armies of young people with nothing to do. The problem was methodological. The NBS was using the International Labour Organization definition of unemployment, which counted anyone who had done even one hour of work in the past week as employed. A man who washed one car for two hundred naira on a Saturday was classified as employed. A woman who sold three sachets of pure water on a Monday was employed. The definition bore no relationship to the reality of Nigerian labour markets. Eventually, the NBS adopted a broader measure that better captured underemployment and disguised unemployment, and suddenly the combined unemployment and underemployment rate jumped to over 33 percent. The economy had not changed. The measurement