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A visit to MTN office summarized the bureaucracy in Ghana

Anybody who has lived in Ghana for a substantial period of time, or have had to interact with any government department is unlikely to dispute the fact that there’s unbearable bureaucracy in Ghana. Simple things are unnecessarily prolonged, and many obstacles are placed in the way of people who want to make ends meet, or contribute meaningfully to the development of our dear country. I will not delve into the reasons, causes and effects of this bureaucracy. I just want to share an experience of my interaction with a particular private institution. This experience is worth sharing because one would expect a difference in how private institutions conduct their business since the shareholders’ “stomachs are in their business”. Their success or failure depends on how well the business is managed, unlike government officials who get paid regardless of how well their departments perform. The company in question is MTN Ghana.

My history with MTN Ghana

I have been an MTN Ghana customer for many years (probably around 15 years). The current personal SIM I’m using was registered in September 2018, but I had used other MTN SIMs before that. I also have two other MTN SIMs for business, one for calls (used also as my business WhatsApp line) and one for mobile money (momo). I have also been using MTN internet data for the past 13 months straight until recently I had to switch back to Vodafone Ghana because of data cost. So it’s not like an outsider or some random person trying to soil the name of MTN Ghana. I feel It’s necessary to share some of these experiences to hopefully push them to provide better services to their customers. The experience I had was with the business momo account.

Registration of business momo account with MTN Ghana

I started an online marketplace, and needed a momo account in order to connect the website to a payment gateway to facilitate online payments on the website. Since MTN is the most widely used telecommunications (telecom) service provider, I decided to use their momo service over services from other providers such as Vodafone. I followed the required process and had an MTN momo account opened for my business and I was provided with the corresponding SIM. However, I didn’t use the account for a long time, so it went into a dormant state (my fault, I know). When I decided to finally use the account, I had to have it reactivated.

You might say, “Well, just get to the MTN office and have the account reactivated!”

Well, I did go to the MTN office, but the momo account was not activated that day.

Why not?

This is the very reason for this post. Read on to see why.

I can’t remember when exactly I visited the Wa branch of MTN Ghana, but It was in the third quarter of 2023. When I presented my problem to the MTN customer service personnel, he told me I HAD TO provide my business documents before my business momo account could be reactivated.

What?!! Provide my business documents again? “I thought I provided the original documents to you and you scanned and uploaded them to your system when you opened the account for me?!” was my reaction.

Where are my documents?

Why the … were they asking for my business documents again when they should already have scanned copies of them in their system. Since they also had a scan of my ID in their system, I expected a very simple and straight forward 3-step process:

  1. Request for my ID;
  2. Check that the ID matched the one in their system;
  3. Activate my business momo account, or send whatever request needed to be sent to headquarters for the account activation.

Why would they want me to produce my business documents again?? I didn’t even think of taking my business documents along because it didn’t make sense to do so. I took only my ID card.

Were my business documents still in their system in the first place? Is it possible that something happened and they lost customers’ data and needed to re-upload them? Well, I would expect the customer service personnel to tell me so, but he didn’t when I inquired about the reason why I had to produce my business documents again.

He simply told me that was the requirement.

Was it that the customer service personnel wasn’t knowledgeable enough so he placed an unrealistic demand on a customer? I doubt that the customer service personnel would make such a demand if it wasn’t a company-established procedure.

This experience summarizes the frustrating bureaucratic system we find ourselves in in Ghana. Even a multi-national private company like MTN operating in Ghana has not seen the need to alter the status quo.

Why should this negative experience with MTN service be a concern?

It appears that in Ghana we don’t value people’s time, and causing inconvenience to others seems to be regarded as a trivial matter. This bureaucracy affected me in a number of ways:

  1. The time I spent to go to the MTN office and return was wasted. This is time I could have used to accomplish something meaningful.
  2. It cost me money to travel to the office and back. This is money I cannot get back.
  3. I risked my life in traffic to get to the office and back, but did not benefit from the visit.
  4. I went through an undeserved frustration. This may seem trivial, but it is an accumulation of experiences like these that cause some of the health issues some people are going through.

In summary, the visit was a waste of valuable resources, and this was totally avoidable if the unnecessary request of submitting documents they already had had been removed.

Lamentation

When at all will this our country change for the better? Who will save us from this frustrating system? Where is our hope, oh mother Ghana? Who will save us from ourselves? Who will save us from this dungeon of bureaucracy called Ghana?

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