Greedy Merchant: Abuja’s Bannex Plaza Fingered In Sales of Substandard Products

Secret Reporters

Sales of substandard or counterfeit goods to unsuspecting customers are a prevalent and long-standing practice that persists even today. In Nigeria, this practice is mostly associated with a particular tribe or group of people from a specific region in the country, but on the contrary, it is common with individuals driven by greed.

A victim of substandard products in Nigeria recently reached out to SecretReporter to share his experience after purchasing a product he believed to be of standard from a store located at Bannex.

Bannex is a plaza situated in the heart of Abuja. Several items related to computers, phones, and accessories are sold and repaired at Bannex. It is populated by different businessmen who own stores and can be compared to the popular computer village in Lagos State, Nigeria.

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According to the victim, who chose to remain anonymous for personal reasons, he went to Bannex with the hope of finding a high-quality Tablet device for his work. He met with a man named Mr. Chuks, who claimed to have a Tablet that meets his specifications and budget. The victim emphasised that he was particular about the specifications, which were a Tablet with 3GB or 4GB of RAM, the capability to receive a 4G LTE network, and no less than an Android 10.0 operating system.

Mr. Chuks took him to a shop in Bannex called Ivory Phones and Gadgets, where he was shown a Modio M21 Tablet. The victim inspected the product and verified that all the specifications he requested were listed in the settings menu of the tablet, but did not have time or internet to test if what was listed is exactly what was installed on the Tablet. However, he paid the sum of Ninety Seven thousand Naira (N97,000) for the product, on April 4th, 2023, believing he had purchased a high-quality product.

However, when he got home and set up the Tablet for work, he realized that he had been sold a counterfeit Tablet. Upon checking the settings menu, he noticed that the Tablet’s Android version which was listed as 10.0, displays an advertisement that reveals Android Lollipop (Android 5.0), as the operating system installed on the Tablet, when you double tap on it.

Android version 5.0 is an outdated operating system that was released in 2014. It is over 8 years old and Google has stopped releasing updates for this operating system. Also, he discovered that the tablet was showing a 4G network, despite his SIM card being a 3G network SIM card and was yet to be upgraded to a 4G network.

The victim disclosed that he was unable to find some software needed for his work on the Tablet’s Play Store, as many software producers have stopped making their applications compatible with older operating systems like Android 5.0.

When SecretReporters reached out to the owner of the store where the victim bought the substandard Tablet, the owner insisted that as far as he is concerned, what he sold to the victim was what the victim wanted as it was listed on the Tablet settings menu, all effort to explain to him that what was listed on the settings menu of the Tablet is not what is actually on the Tablet, fell on deaf ear and he refused to replace the product with a more standard product for the victim.

The sale of counterfeit and substandard goods to unsuspecting victims is becoming a menace and to some extent encouraged by the Nigerian government. This is so, due to the failure of the Nigerian government to be proactive in checkmating and ensuring that products and goods comply with the standard as well as the requirement written on them before they reach the market or consumer.