Mobile phones are spreading through Sierra Leone like a cholera epidemic. Everyone either has one or aspires to one. Phone theft is common (my own lasted a week). People will sacrifice meals or school fees to buy credits (everyone is on pay-as-you-go, and stalls selling top-up scratch cards are ubiquitous, as are recharging shops, since few have electricity at home).
There is keen competition among the major mobile networks – Zain, Africell and Comium adverts adorn billboards, bars and houses, whose owners charge a monthly rent for you to daub your logo over their walls. They sponsor pop concerts, sports events and even Freetown’s venerable cotton tree, under which the first freed slaves congregated to plan their new lives.
As in Europe, the operators do not shirk from sharp practice. Calls to someone else on your network are cheap, but if you call a Zain phone from an Africell sim your costs soar. To combat this, Sierra Leoneans buy a sim card for each network and give out three numbers to contacts – a sim costs a dollar, and phones are sold unlocked. Some have handsets that can carry two cards at once, and you press a button to choose which to use for a particular call. Others have three phones with a different sim in each. The less affluent have to open up their phone to change the card each time they call another network (this of course means that you often have to dial three different numbers before you can get through to someone).
The mobile exerts a dictatorial hold on social intercourse. Nothing is more important than an incoming call. Businesspeople interrupt meetings to take calls from friends, family and colleagues; the judge in a court case we observed last week kept halting proceedings whenever his phone rang; a beer with a Sierra Leonean friend is a series of stops and starts as he or she fields calls or replies to texts.
Phones reflect social status too. The powerful screen contacts by giving their regular number only to a select few, with a number they rarely answer used to fob off unwanted hangers-on. Those lacking funds will “flash” wealthier peers, dialling and hanging up before the latter answers in the expectation that he will return (and pay for) the call.
The next big battle in the mobile sphere will be over mobile payments. These are a new thing in Sierra Leone, but Africa is the world leader in this fledgling industry, with Kenya’s M-PESA already boasting 8.5 million subscribers.
Mobile payments are Africa’s version of online transactions. Few people on the continent have bank accounts, let alone regular and secure internet access, but many have phones, and cash. Until recently, if you wanted to get money to someone you couldn’t hand it to in person (and as well as buying and selling goods, Africans with jobs send money to relatives all the time), you either had to send it with a friend (not always secure) or use a professional middleman like Western Union or a bank (expensive and often absent outside the main cities). Mobile payments are both secure and cheap, and they do not rely on the availability of banks.
To make one, you take cash into a payment outlet – the latter can be anywhere that holds cash, from banks to shops to bars to hotels. You then text your PIN number and transaction details to the payment company, which sends a message to the recipient. The recipient can then collect the cash from his own nearest outlet. The outlet owner and the payment company take a commission.
Mohammed, an illegal money changer on Siaka Stevens Street in Freetown, used to get money to his grandmother in the provinces by either taking it himself, which meant transport costs and taking valuable time off work, or sending it with friends, who sometimes “lost” the money in transit. He now uses mobile payments instead, and says it’s a much safer way of ensuring his grandmother “eats” the money.
At present, only transactions within the country are possible, but with Sierra Leoneans receiving $150 million a year in remittances from abroad (and that is just those that are recorded), it is not surprising that a couple of entrepreneurs I’ve met are staking out the territory for cross-border payments.
