A new plan by the Consumer Protection Council (CPC) to institute a fresh investigation into the alleged complaints by Nigerians on the operations of DStv in Nigeria will start in August.
The CPC, in a notice of its plan to commence fresh investigation signed by its Director- General, Dupe Atoki, and served on MultiChoice Nigeria Limited, said that consumers, who alleged wide-range abuse of their rights, had inundated it with a barrage of complaints.
The CPC also stated that despite its earlier interventions in form of meetings, telephone and written correspondences with the company to resolve the issues and develop quality standards to safeguard the interest of consumers, complaints had been pouring in unabated against the company.
“These complaints in effect allege that the DStv service does not conform with international best practice and is specifically designed to exploit Nigerian consumers who have suffered loss by not being able to fully enjoy or receive the benefit or actualise the full purpose for which they purchased or subscribed to the service.
“The complaints include poor quality of service such as incessant disruption of service without compensation, while subscription is current; wrongful abrupt disconnection of service during subsisting subscriptions; monthly subscriptions lasting less than 30 days and poor redress mechanism and customer service,” CPC added.
Others, according to CPC, are advertisements on customer care lines at the expense of consumers; poor implementation of decoder swap policy and effecting price increase for subscriptions despite payment before due date of increase.”
The council said that its investigation would involve receiving relevant evidence and documents from complainants, MultiChoice, satellite broadcast experts and witnesses, as well as relevant sector regulators.
The court had recently given a ruling in favour of DStv regarding the issue of alleged increase in subscription fee for its services.
DStv is the subsidiary of Multichoice Nigeria, a South Africa-based Multichoice Africa, which has emerged as a dominant player in the Nigerian satellite television market.
In the past few years, DStv had faced one legal battle after another from aggrieved subscribers, who were dissatisfied with the programming services and unreasonable subscription hikes across their various bouquets.
MultiChoice Nigeria is expected to prepare a written response on the allegations contained in the notice of investigation, as well as provide other relevant documents and information that may be necessary.
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