Zain Sucks
Posted By Sika on March 12, 2009
Beyond the connection issues and the sporadic disappearing text messages, Zain is doing two things I think are particularly nasty:
1. They’ve added expiration dates to their units. Celtel never had expiration dates before it became Zain. As a matter of fact, you can still use Celtel units to top up. People sell units on the street–there will be 3 or 4 outside each of the banks and the post office in town. At major road junctions, there are a few umbrella-covered tables with people working. The people who work usually make about K10 ($0.07) for every K1000 units they sell. But it’s work in a country when most people can’t find jobs, and it’s often work that women can do to feed their children and gain some tiny measure of independence.
I foresee that many of the women will not realize the significance of the tiny printed expiration dates and will end up with dead units on their hands and therefore no way to buy new units and will be effectively put out of business.
2. They’ve added something called a Zachangu bonus. It’s a 10% bonus that you get whenever you top up at special retailers. So, this is probably going to drive people away from the street sellers (or Celtel Call Girls, as Derek likes to call them) and to businesses that don’t need the money nearly as much. And it will, because 10% is a lot, and it’s not based on how much you buy or anything except WHERE you buy. So there’s no way for the street sellers to compete.
I’m not sure if there’s a reason behind this effort to put them out of work, or if it’s just accidental blindness.
It sounds like accidental blindness to me, but I don’t get all the subtle clues that you do.
Given that they’ve got to know how the units are distributed here, it’s got to be something they could figure out if they just thought about it, right? I mean, it seems like they’d almost have to try to ignore the effects of their policy changes.
But, they’re in the middle east, not here, and so what happens here is remote; When they came here during the Celtel/Zain switchover, their representatives didn’t speak either of the national languages. Which is one of the reasons Kris uses an African company, Telkom, instead.
If they are being accidentally blind, though, I think they’re choosing not to consider the fallout. Is there such a thing as intentional accidental blindness?