TV licensing and car ownership in the West

My dad once told me that his doctoral research supervisor, Dr Ron Williams, a Senior Lecturer at The University of Wales in the 1980s, told him he did not have a TV at home because he could not afford it.
I did not understand why Dr Williams could not afford a TV until many years later when I returned to the UK as an adult who owns a TV. In 2015, I bought a TV on sales for £200 (its price before sales was £300 or slightly more). Unknown to me, that was the beginning of some problems.
To use the TV in viewing live programs, I was told to pay £145.50 every year lest I will be watching the TV illegally which could incur a fine of up to £1000. I obliged and paid £290 for the first two years. In the third year, I opted for monthly payments because I thought there was no reason to make a full-year payment since I do not have one more year to live in the UK.

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I opted to pay in instalments. Unfortunately, the minimum instalment payment requires that I pay £29.4 monthly for a period of five or six months, so that, according to the licensing agency, I will be able to ‘rest’ (meaning I will be free from further payment) until the end of the year. To the licensing agency, you cannot do otherwise but pay for a period of one year (and request for a refund if you leave the UK before the completion of the subscription period). On getting a call from the TV license office today, requesting for money, I told the caller to call me back later because I may have to rethink if I still need the TV whose running cost has since overwhelmed its price, making it a liability for me than an asset.
But ordinarily, I may not have needed a TV in the first place if I didn’t have a family. When I was living as a bachelor in the UK for a period of 14 months during my masters’ degree period, I never watched a TV as I was not (and still not) in any way interested in British or European political affairs to fancy even seeing the news. I am so disinterested about European affairs that if you ask me the name of the British prime minister, for example, I may need to think for a minute to tell you the name. But in any event, I now understand why my dad’s supervisor could not afford a TV. Affordability here does not mean the ability to buy it; it means you are not able to accommodate its add-on problems. Amongst the add-on problems, you are likely to face may also include receiving calls from insurance companies persuading you to initiate a monthly direct debit from your account to ensure the TV. In my own case, I received these calls three times persuading me to sign up for insurance but I refused.

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Now, this incident reminds me of another narrative I heard about America some time ago when I was in Nigeria. Sometimes, the understanding of life in the West is not easily understood by Africans, when stories of the West are related to them when they live in Africa. I was once told by a Nigerian who knows America very well that in America; you may see a car abandoned by the roadside because the owner of the car no longer wants it. When such narrative about America is related to you in Africa, you would think that the lesson in that narrative is that America is so prosperous a country that people throw away their cars! But that is not correct. People throw-away cars in the West because they cannot afford to repair it or to keep it running.
You can buy a very decently used car for $500 for example, then it breaks down after some time because its timing belt (or another mechanical component) is worn out, and fixing the timing belt (or its other components) requires more money than the cost of the car because the mechanic charges you for every hour that it takes him to fix the car plus the cost of the components which is most times replaced with a new one as opposed to refurbishment or improvisation. When you are faced with that situation, the only sensible thing to do is to abandon the car and arrange to buy another one, if you still are interested in being a car owner. So, that car in America was so dumped by its owner not because America is a prosperous country where people want to dump their cars at the slightest provocation, but because America is a hard country in terms of getting the car fixed.
Therefore, it is not true that owning a car in the West is not as much a luxury as it is in Africa. The difference here is simple to understand. In the West, the price of the car is not the issue, keeping the car is, while in Africa, keeping the car is not the issue, the price is.
Taking narratives about the West from Africa at face value could thus be misleading until you either experience it yourself or you are critical about it.

Mohammed Dahiru Aminu

Mohammed Dahiru Aminu, wrote from Cranfield, England. [email protected]