NIGERIA: The Consumer Has Rights — So What?

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Aug 28 1997 (IPS) - Fola Awosika, a medical doctor, returned from the United States some years ago with electronic and hospital equipment which he installed in a clinic he set up here.

Months later, a power surge in his area damaged most of the equipment. Thinking that he could sue the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) — as is the case in the United States — Awosika went to see his lawyer, and came in for a rude shock.

“Sorry, you cannot sue NEPA in this country,” he heard from his lawyer, who went on to explain, Awosika recalled, that “the decree setting up the body does not allow consumers to take legal action against it in the case of damage to property resulting from power supply, so if you go to court you cannot win.”

Like Awosika, many Nigerians have fallen victim to NEPA’s erratic power supply which has damaged equipment, destroyed refrigerated foodstuff and even caused deaths, but can do absolutely nothing about it.

“NEPA and NITEL (Nigeria Telecommunications) perpetuate the worst service fraud against all consumers with elucidating impunity,” Awosika told participants at a consumer rights workshop held here on Aug. 26 here. The government is to blame, he added, for giving the two public utilities immunity.

While NEPA and NITEL cannot be touched, Nigerian consumers are free to seek redress when they feel cheated — for example when they are sold fake or sub-standard goods such as the bogus medicinal drugs that abound here. However, few are aware of their rights in this sphere or willing to vindicate them.

“Educated Nigerians in urban centres know that they can report to the Standards Organisation of Nigeria or go to court to seek compensation for defective goods sold to them, but most often, nobody cares because they don’t have the time to waste,” says Segun Lawrence, a journalist.

Lawrence recalled that he once had to use soldiers to force a dealer to change a faulty spare part he had sold him.

“The sparepart dealer had refused to change the defective part I bought from him for my car the previous day because he argued that his receipt said goods taken away cannot be returned. I took some soldier friends to his shop and after a little harassment, he had to change it,” he told IPS.

Paradoxically, Nigeria’s government has been involved in consumer protection — through agencies it set up to control the importation and production of goods — for more than a quarter of a century now.

In 1971, fourteen years before the U.N. General Assembly adopted guidelines for consumer protection, it issued Decree 56, establishing the Nigerian Standards Organisation to curb the flooding of the country’s markets with low quality goods.

That edict was strengthened by Decree 32 of 1984, which changed the organisation’s name to the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and empowered it not only to seize and destroy sub-standard goods but also to close factories that produce them.

It also has the power to impose a fine of not less than 50,000 naira (about 625 dollars) on erring manufacturers and a fine of 5,000 naira (some 62 dollars) or a two-year-jail term on individual offenders.

Then, in 1992, the government set up the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) to regulate foods, chemicals, medicines and other products consumed by citizens.

Apart from these controlling bodies, Nigeria’s government was also involved in the establishment in 1993 of a Consumer Rights Association in the Ministry of Information. However, this association is moribund, as is the non-governmental Consumer Education and Protection Council of Nigeria.

In the meantime, many ordinary Nigerians still do not know what their rights are, what to do or where to seek redress when defective or fake goods are sold to them.

Arming them with this type of knowledge is one of the aims of Consumer Campaign Foundation (CCF), an NGO established in November 1996, and which held the Aug. 26 workshop. The event marked the start of a mass media enlightenment campaign by the CCF, an affiliate of the U.K.-based Consumer International.

According to CCF President Lanre Oginni, the foundation aims to make Nigerians aware of consumer rights through seminars, workshops and a multi-media approach.

“Other objectives include to encourage the development of market conditions which provide consumers with greater choice at lower prices, to encourage a high level of ethical conduct for those engaged in the production and distribution of goods and services to consumers and to assist in curbing abusive business practices by all enterprises in Nigeria,” he explained.

“Consumers in this part of the world are being taken for a ride by most manufacturers, marketers and advertisers because of lack of knowledge as to how to assert their rights,” Oginni charged. “Therefore, the consumer needs to be educated to enable him ask informed and critical questions regarding the availability, price, packaging, quality and marketing of goods and services which he is about to purchase.”

Will the new association go the way of its predecessors? Oginni does not think so. “Two moribund consumer associations in the past achieved nothing because they lacked funding and direction, not knowing what to do, but the main focus of the CCF will be to take its campaigns to the grassroots, including going to schools to make students cultivate the idea of consumer buying rights from the cradle,” he told IPS.

To give consumers legal support to enforce their rights against the advertisers, manufacturers and distributors of substandard or bogus goods, Oginni wants the provisions of the Consumer Protection Decree 66 implemented.

The decree, signed into law by former military leader Gen. Ibrahim Babangida in 1992, makes the manufacture, advertising or sale of sub-standard products a criminal offence.

It stipulates that any manufacturer convicted under its provisions by a competent court shall be liable to a fine of 50,000 naira (about 625 dollars) or five years imprisonment or both. The same penalties apply to people involved in advertising such goods.

“If this decree is fully enforced, it will help the various institutions that are saddled with the protection of consumers, especially the consumer association,” Oginni said.