Romanus Adimora: Saka, porting and the logic of history Posted By TheScoop on June 8, 2013 0 10 by Romanus Adimora An interesting debate has been raging on in the communication and advertising sub-sectors in the last couple of weeks. Stirred by the sudden and dramatic switch of camps by artiste Hafeez Oyetoro, alias Saka, from Etisalat to MTN, the controversy is similar to the occasional hullabaloo that always accompanies the decamping of a notable political figure from one Nigerian political party to another. Saka is a popular character specially created to market latecomer telecom service provider Etisalat by its ad agency, and was highly successful in that regard. But quite suddenly, on the heels of the Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) Mobile Number Portability campaign recently, the MTN, the leading network service provider, cleverly got Saka to port go and thus desert Etisalat in a manner that seems to have left a sour taste in the mouths of not just some people in the advertising world but also many observers. READ: Before Saka There Was…: A Look At ‘Portability’ In The Nigerian Political Space READ: Solomon Osadolo: Winning The Porting Race Yet the question remains as to whether any real breach of professional ethics has been committed by either Mr. Hafeez Oyetoro or the MTN as a company, given the fact that Saka had no written or verifiable contractual accord with Etisalat. Rather in their deals, Saka was all the time treated and remunerated as a casual worker and there was no attempt to measure the character’s impact on the campaign, which would have possibly revealed his true worth and perhaps helped to raise his earning profile and thus endear the relationship to both parties. So what has happened can be attributed to a costly oversight or complaisance on the part of Etisalat, which the MTN as a competitor may have all along noticed and was only bidding for the right time to exploit with the kind of impact, which has now created eternal lessons for everyone in the advertising field to learn. Such lessons include: (a) the need for written contractual understanding or agreement to seal important business relationships between an artiste and his employer. (b) The need to remunerate artistes adequately so that they would think twice in the face of tempting offers by competitors. (c) The need to adopt impact measurement as a vital component of any major or successful campaign and finally (d) The need to avoid the temptation to underrate any artiste or treat him shabbily because in a dynamic world like advertising, the least expected model may prove the ultimate ambassador of a brand. But, above everything else, the dramatic porting of Saka from the Etisalat stable to MTN and its roaring impact so far on the latter’s portability campaign as well as the obvious shock and tremor it has left in the Etisalat camp count as a big plus for artistes generally who may henceforth no longer be taken for granted by hirers. Nevertheless, having made great waves in so short a period at Etisalat, not a few observers believe that Saka’s time was really up, because any further campaign on the side of the same brand would certainly be affected by the Law of Diminishing Returns. In other words, such people believe that Saka’s departure to another port of call where, in a new environment and working in a different costume at a better remuneration, he would live once again up to the Saka billing, was indeed inevitable. Which is to say that Etisalat need not brood over the divorce but should hold firm to the saying that “soldier go soldier come”. All in all, one should salute the regulatory wisdom of the NCC for wittingly or otherwise affording Nigerians an opportunity to let off steam and rewind via a veritable dialogue or discourse as an unexpected result of the introduction of the long awaited mobile number portability campaign. In fact, the controversy promises an unintended consequence of boosting the portability campaign at little or no cost to the regulatory body. What’s more, it is all happening at a time when the players in the political arena certainly may be tinkering with what they know best: swapping of political platforms—a situation which in political parlance they variously term “carpet crossing” and “decamping”—two words with offensive or negative connotations compared with porting which has now crept into our political lexicon, thanks to the NCC. The point one is trying to make here is that if for any reason any of our politicians switches camp as Governor Okorocha has just done, we should be sympathetic and charitable enough to see the situation as an act of porting and no longer carpet crossing or decamping, in order to make the action appear less offensive or dirty by deemphasizing the ugly or negative content…I have digressed. But returning directly to Saka’s controversial attitude to the Etisalat, one would like to posit that there is nothing strange because examples of players in various fields at various times porting forth and back on grounds of better opportunities or quest for self-fulfillment abound in history. Take two cases. Sir George Taubman Goldie was a professional soldier in the British Royal Artillery where he rose to be a captain. In that capacity Goldie had toured Sudan and the lower Nile River area. With his eyes on business, even as a military officer, Goldie developed a good interest in the sprawling country to the west of Sudan, and subsequently played Saka by dumping his military commission and switching to the English Niger Company—an association of English and Scottish merchants spoiling for real colonial exploits in the Niger Delta territory. The result of this earliest form of porting by Goldie was the emergence of the Royal Niger Company a few years later with the full complement of royal chatter granting the company exclusive trading rights up to and beyond the lower Niger basin. With that chatter, Goldie proceeded to set up a military outfit with whose help he stamped out pockets of resistance to the anti-slavery efforts of the British government and enforced peace apace with flourishing trade in the territory. Thus before the 1885 Berlin Conference on the partition of Africa, Goldie had on behalf of the British government secured treaties with many communities in his area of operation which eventually helped Britain to effectively lay claim to the whole territory that finally emerged as Nigeria. Almost simultaneously as Goldie was working to secure the Niger area for Britain, Major Fredrick Lugard, another Royal Artillery officer, was also playing Saka, porting and joining the league of British merchants and colonialists —an adventure that saw him working at various times in various places including India, Hong Kong and Uganda. Lugard finally ported back to the Royal Niger Company in the last days of the Royal Charter after which he ported yet again to her Majesty’s service whereupon it became his place in history to amalgamate Nigeria. So the whole idea of the creation of a great and prosperous entity like Nigeria under the British empire is chiefly a glowing tribute to the foresight and good business sense of the British Niger Company which, like in the MTN/Etisalat/Saka scenario, had encouraged both Capt. Goldie and Major Lugard to port go from a boring and less lucrative career in the military in favor of more profitable exploits in the more rewarding spheres of business and colonial pursuits. Therefore, what the heights achieved by people like Goldie, Lugard and others tend to show today is that there is nothing strange or new in the role artiste Hafeez Oyetoro played recently on the marketing or business scene. Nor was the MTN’s role therein inappropriate. In a volatile world like ours, nothing should be expected to be static or sacrosanct and the advertising or marketing scene is part and parcel of that world—a universe whose beauty, fascination and essence partly depend on the extent to which individual players, play-makers and play masters can rule their worlds. Therefore as Saka was porting that day from Etisalat to the MTN, he must have been muttering to himself: “People go with me everywhere I go”
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:38:53 +0000
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