A booming phone card rental (hiring) business is emerging around pay phones booths in the country. It appears to be gaining patronage rather in the bigger towns of Accra, Tema and Kumasi, which ironically have more of these phones installed.

The irony also lies in the fact that over eighty per cent of the 200,000 fixed lines and the 130,000 mobile phone users are in these same urban centres.

More interestingly, the emerging business thrives largely on trust. The service providers who are all in their teens and early twenties do not have to go back to the booth to check whether the information the last user gave him is correct or not. Most of the dealers have a minimum of basic education.

It costs ?500 for a unit. A 25-unit pay card goes for ?8,500. So, what it means is that the service deliverer makes ?2,000 for every 25-unit rented out.

Communication centres charge between ?900 and ?1,000 for a three-minute local call. Additional minutes attract different charges, often slightly lower.

Expectedly, the business is very brisk in areas with high concentration of people and lower income suburbs of the cities and major towns.

In Tema, the business is thriving around the various post offices, but its more noticeable at the Ghana Telecom municipal office, situated in the heart of the most impoverished and badly planned part of the best planned city in the country.

Most major post offices have a minimum of five such phones. These pay phones are quickly repaired once they break down, unlike the others further away from Ghana Telecom offices. This undoubtedly draws more users to these areas.

But the patronage of the service is not restricted to only what could be classified as heavily "HIPC" areas.

Until University of Ghana students went on break last June it was a thriving business on campus, although most of the phones on campus were faulty.

But now that eight new ones have been installed following the university's hosting of the First West Africa University Games last week. The business is expected to return with a bang when students come back at the end of this month to begin the 2001/2002 academic year.

Ghana Telecom's introduction of pay phones in 1994 won instant public approval of the then government's privatisation of the service although the mood has since changed against the divestiture of the giant in the country's telephone industry.

The market for renting cards surged when Ghana Telecom (GT) increased the price of pay phone cards for all the units. The 25, 50 and 100unit cards now sell at ?8,500, ?14,000 and ?25,000. They were sold for ?6,000, ?12,500 and ?23,500 respectively.

Communication centres charge between ?900 and ?1,000 for a three-minute local call. Additional minutes attract slightly lower charges.

But the uneven spread of Communication centres coupled with the high charges make pay phones more attractive to many public phone users.

About 4,200 pay phones have been installed country-wide. GT has targeted to instal a total of 10,000 pay phones in the next three years.

But the distribution heavily weighs in favour of urban and suburban areas against the rural areas, which have limited means of communication.

This contradicts sharply with initial government announcements that the pay phones were rather going to be installed in the hinterlands to bridge the yawning communication gab between these areas and the urban centres.

A sizeable number of the phones are, however, faulty. Ghana Telecom has blamed the public for the breakdown of about 450 of these phones. Some of these phones reject new cards as "void", are unable to register numbers punched and others which function intermittently severe calls abruptly.

And the public has, for now, remained silent over the company's accusations.

GT says some users deliberately insert "foreign materials" such as blade and similar objects to make free calls.

General Manager GT's pay phone Division, Samuel Kwesi Ainsoh, says that most of the faults were due to vandalism, fraudulent acts by some users to cheat and the lack of spare parts to replace outmoded ones.

The company has started a programme to blacklist areas prone to misuse.

GT says it cost the company upto ?1.2 billion per annum to repair vandalised pay phones in the country. This amount can enable the company to buy 500 pay phones, according to the pay phone, General Manager.