Gokada shuts down….Temporarily

As from today, August 14 2019, Gokada will not be available. The app will be down and the pilots will be off the road. It is shutting down, so says CEO Fahim Saleh.

Hold on….Not for long though. This is sort out some of the operational issues that the CEO observed on a trip on a Gokada ride. But I should assume that he may have been having some complaints about the service recently so as a take such a drastic action. No CEO would be sane enough to stop an active service without considering possible backlash from frequent customers….Only if the issues are major.

Well for what it is, Fahim Says the Gokada service would not be available till Monday the 26th of August 2019.

He narrated a recent experience on a Gokada ride where he witnessed first hand the issues customers face, trying to use Gokada.

According to him in a medium post,

So what’s going on? Well, a little over a week ago I had taken a Gokada hoping to avoid traffic to get to the mainland bridge from VI. From there I planned to take a car. I opened the Gokada app, requested, got a pilot, and waited patiently for him to arrive. I called to confirm my location which the pilot said he knew. 5 minutes pass by.. and the pilot had not moved. Another 5 minutes pass and the pilot was going in the wrong direction.

After 15 minutes and three phone calls, the pilot finally arrived at which point I’m thinking it might have been faster to take a car all the way through. Upon questioning the pilot, I learned that he didn’t use GPS on his phone because the earplugs he had were broken. Irritated, I motioned him to get started with the ride as I was in a hurry. It should be pretty obvious how to get to the mainland bridge from VI, so I didn’t concern myself with providing him directions but I knew from Google Maps using the best route, it should only take 10–15 minutes.

After about 15 minutes, we were still on the road. I hastily took out my phone and did a quick input of the directions to the bridge and realized we were still 15 minutes away. This pilot had taken a long route to get to the bridge, one that would have been completely avoided had he used the map. I motioned that I would direct him based on the Google Maps navigation.

Unfortunately, just as we were about to reach the bridge I directed the pilot to a wrong turn which would have required us to turn all the way around. At this point, it was obvious that a car would have been much faster even with all the traffic. How could I be the CEO of Gokada, the company that pioneered motorcycle ride-hailing in Nigeria and be saying this? I was disappointed in Gokada but most of all, I was disappointed in myself.

I told the pilot to pull over to the side of the road, I would hop over the median and wait for an Uber. “This is what it has come to,” I thought.

So he made the decision to temporarily suspend the service to fix the observed issues. According to him, “It’s not easy criticizing your own company. But either I could ignore these issues and move along happily like everything was fine. Or I could realize that this kind of thing is happening to our customers thousands of times over. I am not ok with that.

Gokada was started to change the perception of what the bike taxi could be in terms of safety, convenience, and transparency. In many ways, we’ve succeeded but we have also failed. We can only win by doing right to our customers and our pilots. That is why today I am excited to announce our Gokada 2.0 initiative.”

Fahim says that Gokada 2.0 initiative would entail the following:

• Brand new bikes – Much better quality and sexy as hell.
• All drivers retrained – We’re closing shop to retrain our drivers in customer service, hygiene, driving, and navigation use.
• Higher safety measures – Maximum speeds, adhering to all traffic laws, new Bluetooth helmets.
• Happier drivers – We’re offering drivers more: maintaining their bikes for free, opening a drivers club, and expanding our health benefits.

Well with increasing competition, Gokada realises that it must provide a top notch service so as to remain in the game. And with the recent US$5.3 million funding and Ayodeji Adewunmi coming on board as co-CEO, stakeholders will expect nothing less.