For visitors and residents of Lagos, the Computer Village in Ikeja is different strokes for different folks. Oluoma Omeihe, who has been following the trend of business in the market, reports.
When Olubunmi Akomolafe lost the power pack of her HP laptop, she was advised by her friends on the campus to visit the Computer Village, Ikeja, for a replacement any time she visited Lagos. An undergraduate of Ekiti State University,Ado Ekiti, the opportunity for Olubunmi to visit Lagos came recently, and she took it.
Being a first-time visitor to the market, she was assailed by a horde of traders. While some operated in shops, many, especially young men and women, plied their trade at the fringes, preferring to stand by the roadside canvassing clients.
After a long moment of indecision, she was assured of quality and a good deal for her money. She followed one of the many female ‘canvassers’ to a shop and picked a power pack. “It was tested in my presence and it worked perfectly. I paid N4,000 and left. When I got to my uncle’s house at Agege, I still used it and it worked. I was excited that, at least, I had got a replacement for my faulty power pack,” she told The Nation.
But her joy was shortlived as the power pack packed up after two weeks. She could not return the item because it was not covered by warranty and she couldn’t risk another trip from Ado Ektiti to Lagos, about four hours drive; it was not worth the deal, especially now that the roads have become death traps. So, she resigned to fate, kept the power pack in the hope that whenever she visited the city, she would go and lodge a complaints to the person who sold it to her. “I did not have an opportunity to come back to Lagos until the end of the semester exams, that was about three months after. So, when I came, my uncle advised me not to bother myself as I was not likely to meet the person in the shop again,” she said.
If Olubunmi’s power pack lasted for only two weeks, the handset Patrick Chukwudi bought never worked at all. According to him, he had heard so much about a firm selling handsets in the market and made up his mind to go and buy from there. When he alighted from the Danfo bus that brought him to the market, somewhere in front of Awolowo House, Ikeja, he was attracted to the stand of a group of boys who displayed phones in a container under a canopy close to Safegate Microfinance Bank Limited on Awolowo Way, Ikeja.
“It was as if I was hynotised. When I got there, I saw very attractive handsets but they were not in their packs. They persuaded me to buy one of them, telling me the phones were all in perfect working condition and that all I needed to replace was the battery. So, I paid for one of them and left. I bought a battery and charged it for three hours when I got home. Afetr that, I tried fruitlessly to power it but to no avail,” he recounted, adding that when he got there the following day, the young man that sold the handset to him did not show up. “I cannot imagine myself leaving Itele, Ogun State, to Ikeja to go looking for somebody that, even if I see now, I can scarcely match his face with the transaction,” he said
Olubunmi and Patrick are but a few of the thousands of unsuspecting people who have fallen to the antics of unscrupulous elements in the market in which handsets and other electronic valuables allegedly collected from their owners at gun point have been found.
Perhaps, this development and the fact that the market community has become an embarrassment to the environment prompted the Lagos State Government to shut the gate of the market a few years ago. The situation has since improved as officials of KAI, an agency set up by the state government to enforce environmental law, now virtually has a ‘standing army’ in the market, ensuring that the place is kept clean.
Like in every human community, Computer Village is not all about fraudsters. There are honest young men and women who, through hard work and dedication, are making the market tick.
When Asuquo Daniel had problems with his laptop recently, he lost hope that it would ever work. A friend had introduced him to one of the engineers in the market. “I was working when the screen of my laptop suddenly went dead. I was confused because I did not immediately know what to do. So, I packed it into my bag and went home. When I discussed it with a friend, he introduced me to a young man called Rotimi in the Computer Village who fixed the problem perfectly,” he said.
For traders at the Computer Village, doing business in the market has not been a bed of roses as their products face stiff competition from cheap ones imported from China and other Asian countries. For them to keep afloat, they must reduce the prices of their goods, which affects their profit margins. They also have to contend with power problmes as they pay heavily, running their shops on generating sets.
Nelson Ogeide, sales manager, Seaman Group of Companies, dealers in handsets and other accessories, identified ‘price war’ as a great challenge besetting his business. “We have to cut down our prices. This will eventually eat into the profit margin. The government should do something about the influx of substandard handsets into the country,” he said.
On customers, Ogeide said the challenge his organisation has to contend with is warranty and repairs. According to him, once a customer is told that there is a year or two years warranty on the device and the device gets spoilt, they will return it, adding that in most cases, it is always a physical damage that the devices suffer. “Most of the faults do with physical damage and we try to explain to them that our warranty does not cover physical damage but factory fault problem. In such cases, the customers try to make us look like we are not living up to our responsibilities and so we have to collect such gadgets and try to repair it and if it cannot be not repaired we give them new ones in return,” he explained to The Nation.
According to him, there was a time the firm had issues with returned goods and recorded a great loss up to N3.5b million because the goods couldn’t be returned to the importers.
Another challenge which the firm faces is running the place on power. “Owing to the power problem in the country, we run diesel generators for up to 12 hours that is 8am-8pm daily. Diesel costs a lot of money. Coming to work during public holidays is also a challenge because of transportation problem,” he added.
On what the state government could do to assist the traders, he said the business has got nothing to do with the government, so government funding is not possible. “The only way government can help us is hastening the repair of the main road leading to Simbiat Abiola Way so that customers will be able to park their cars in front of Seaman instead of going around Computer Village in search of parking space,” he told The Nation.
For Sylvester Onuoha, salesman at Sultech Computers, his worry is the low patronage he faces due to cut-throat competition from the big-time computer sellers.“My major challenge is having to compete with large-scale computer sellers. Customers would prefer to go to a large scale business man to coming to my little shop to purchase computer because they are scared of buying fake computers,” he said.
John Oboro, general secretary, Computer and Allied Products Dealer Association (CAPDAN) said the body has mechanisms in place to ensure that people who are short-changed in the course of business transaction get redress. Yes, this Computer Village is the single largest concentration of hardwares in the entire West African sub-region. Anybody that feels aggrieved in the course of doing business can report and CAPDAN will act,” he assured.
Meanwhile, the Commissioner for Science & Technology, Mr Adebiyi Fatai Mabadeje, has assured that Computer Village will move from its present location to another befitting site. The commissioner who addressed ICT editors, said the government has been engaging stakeholders about its intention to relocate them. “Though we are engaging stakeholders, there is a legal issue to the relocation,” he said, adding that the land that was initially scheduled to accommodate the traders somewhere in Abule Egba, a suburb of the state, has been encroached upon. He promised that the government would handover a befitting ICT park to the traders. “We ate not giving up on the matter. We will move them, we have plans for that area (Computer Village),” he said.
