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‘Tobacco industry frustrating enforcement of appropriate laws in Nigeria’

By Edu Abade
08 June 2017   |   3:12 am
It took almost a decade for Nigeria to have a supposedly comprehensive National Tobacco Control Act (NTCA). That law itself has some limitations. But we have a law that one can use to reduce smoking influence in our country and check the onslaught that the tobacco industry....

Akinbode Oluwafemi

The Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) has expressed concerns over delays in implementing the National Tobacco Control Law and attempts by companies to frustrate the enforcement of appropriate laws, as well as the exploitation of farmers in the Southwest. In this interview with EDU ABADE, Deputy Executive Director of ERA/FoEN, Oluwafemi Akinbode, provides insights into the challenges posed by the tobacco industry and the threats to pro-health, public interest laws in the country.

May this year marked two years since the National Tobacco Control Act (NTCA) became law. Why is the issue of implementing the regulations still a challenge?
It took almost a decade for Nigeria to have a supposedly comprehensive National Tobacco Control Act (NTCA). That law itself has some limitations. But we have a law that one can use to reduce smoking influence in our country and check the onslaught that the tobacco industry has on our women and children. By way of marketing, promotions and sponsorships, it is reducing. But unfortunately, that law has a provision that some key sections must have regulations that will pass through a balance. We are convinced that that provision got into the law through the underhand lobbying of the Tobacco Industry, because we have checked all laws in Nigeria and that law is the only one that mandates the government to again bring back regulation for approval of the National Assembly. Be that as it may, there are also some sections of the law that government can implement essentially without the regulation. The government has performed dismally in the implementation of National Tobacco Control Law.

It shouldn’t have taken us two years to get the necessary enforcement of the law going. Sadly, every time we delay on those policies, people are dying and being afflicted with diseases. Our youths and kids are being initiated to deadly habit of smoking by the tobacco industry. So, we think that the major challenge currently is the tobacco industry doing all it can to frustrate the enforcement of the appropriate laws in Nigeria. They have infiltrated the government systems and our Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and they have been undermining the processes of the implementation taking off. For us, we expect the government to rise above the challenge and do what is needful by saving Nigerians lives.

There are well-documented cases of tobacco companies suing governments like we had in Kenya and Uruguay to block implementation of their tobacco control laws. Do you see the Nigerian companies following that path?
We have anticipated that they can go to any length and we are ready for them. They have gone beyond selling tobacco products to our people. They are now conducting espionage on government. Somehow, they get informed memos in government and they have been running campaigns against government decisions and you don’t expect corporations that behave like that not to court when you have a pro-health, public interest law effectively in place. But the truth is, in most of the cases you have cited, the tobacco companies will lose and we know that they will lose in Nigeria.

Recently you visited tobacco farms in Oke-Ogun, Oyo State with the media. Taking our argument from tobacco companies who say they invest heavily in making Nigerian farmers wealthy, what were your findings?
The trip to the farming communities in Oke-Ogun is probably the fifth of such visits to tobacco farms over the years beginning from 2003 but this last one was shocking because we expected some marginal changes in the farms. We were shocked that nothing has changed. We were shocked the way the companies operate or deal with the farmers. The farmers are still living in abject poverty. The arrangement between the companies and the farmers has not changed, whereby they give them fertilizers and farming inputs and at the end of harvest, they dictate the prices. And we were also shocked at the level of non-involvement of government and their agencies in the arrangement between the farmers and the tobacco companies. After those findings, our appeal is that there is no way the government will leave the communities to the dictates of the corporations as we have in Oke-Ogun.

Now, Oke-Ogun is very significant because that belt is the food basket of the South/West. Any nation that takes the food sovereignty of its people seriously would not leave the arable farmlands in the total control of the tobacco industry. Our appeal to government is that the Federal Government should commission an independent investigation into what is going on between the farmers and the corporations. Second, the government should begin an initiative that would wean these farmers from Tobacco products to very wholesome products that can add value to our national life. Because it is so sad that even when they are indebted and want to pay, they cannot pay in Naira. So, they pay in tobacco leaves and where they cannot pay in a particular year in which the tobacco leaves are not enough, the companies pass on the debts to another year and it goes on and on like that. We need the government to intervene; we need a policy that would shift the farmers from the exploitation. Don’t forget that kids that were supposed to be in school are being used on these farms. And tobacco itself is dangerous, chemical intensive, disruptive and adds to our climate problems. Government should take a decisive action on this to move the farmers to very wholesome crops.

ERA/FoEN had dusted the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to demand update on tax waivers and other concessions that tobacco companies benefited from the Nigerian government. This is a novel approach to testing the efficacy of the FOI Act. Aside your requests, are there any specific motivation behind the suit?
We are a civil society group that subscribes to good governance, accountability and social justice. Currently in Nigeria, we know that this government is doing all it can to fight corruption. So, we situate our Freedom of Information (FOI) campaign on government’s fight that seeks to get back all the money, our commonwealth and our resources that people have illegally benefitted and we know that the export expansion grant was thoroughly abused.

Corporations that were not qualified benefitted from huge tax waivers and concessions and we want government to trap those funds and bring them to the national wallet. Most importantly, we made it very clear that tobacco companies that sell death and diseases should not benefit from such waivers, grants and incentives. Thirdly, we should do tobacco control and promote policies on good health. The tobacco companies claim that they publish their tax payments. We know the data are there. Let us have the data so that we can debate it.

We need to know how many waivers they have benefitted from and for which products. We need all the data from the Ministry of Finance and the Customs in taking appropriate decisions on who benefitted from what waivers and how much of tax concessions have been granted.

However, they didn’t give us the information when we wrote to them. Taxation is a key measure for tobacco control. Cigarette is cheaper in Nigeria today than in most western countries. It is being ranked among wholesome products like rice, salt and drugs and we said NO. The world loses about $1trillion annually to tobacco smoking in economic and productivity terms.

In January this year, your organization recommended that in addition to the new taxes on tobacco products, the government should introduce special levies on tobacco. Can you throw more light on this?
A pack of cigarette in the United Kingdom (U.K.) is five pounds. Averagely in the United States, a pack of cigarette cost between $4-$7. That is close to N2000 but a pack sells for N250 in Nigeria. We did a survey and we found that cigarette and probably alcohol are the only two products in Nigeria that their prices have not gone up despite the recession. A report published recently showed that countries that effectively implement taxation, advertising ban, fixation and ban of smoking in public places have seen significant reduction in smoking. But in West Africa, the rate of smoking increases by 3.4 per cent annually because we are not putting in place appropriate measures.

Taxation is a key measure to reducing smoking and its associated problems. The Nigerian government needs to do exactly what other governments are doing to protect their citizens. They need to look at taxation holistically not what was said in January that they were composing excise duties in order to protect manufacturing of cigarette in Nigeria and that goes to another level of incentives to tobacco industry which we challenge. In the first instance, 25 per cent or more of cigarette smoked in Nigeria is actually produced in Nigeria. So, it is of no effect, because they were imposing import duties not excise duties. Tax has to be holistic, they have to raise the levies to 100 percent and they are to raise excise duties. Let people who want to smoke pay for smoking, not the Nigerian government, the Nigeria environment or the Nigerian people subsidizing smoking. That is exactly what we were saying in January. The Ministry of Health should get their facts correct and do extensive research about smoking and tobacco products and not just rank them among wholesome products. How do you rank tobacco as the same thing with medicine?

There has been an upswing in the brands of flavoured cigarettes circulating in the market. What is the reason development and are these brands less harmful?
We have a major problem and that is why we want government to expedite action on the appropriate regulations on tobacco and if you notice recently, the tobacco industry has been making efforts to frustrate every move. NGO’s have been making commentaries about whether the national tobacco committee knows the process of regulation. They really don’t want those regulations and when they do that, they also say things about flavour cigarettes and things like that. Every form of cigarette is bad. Tobacco is a killer. No one should be deceived, whether it is flavoured cigarette, whether it is manufactured in Ibadan or Kafanchan, Nassarawa or Kano, U.K. or in the U.S. Every tobacco including Shisha (the water pipes that they use in clubs now) that is so prevalent among the Nigerian youths and the ladies and is unregulated. They are extremely harmful. They are cancerous agents and we need the regulation urgently to be able to reign in all of them. Tobacco is the leeway to every kind of drug addiction. So, if you do regulate tobacco products, we are going to have substantial reduction in hard drugs that people subsequently take after. People that come out of drug will tell you that they started by smoking tobacco.

Last year, ERA/FoEN exposed the conflicting positions of delegates to the Conference of Parties treaty meeting on tobacco control in India. ERA specifically said the tobacco industry seemed to have infiltrated the government delegates. Are there recommendations to the Ministry of Health to guide against a reoccurrence in future?

I earlier made mention of espionage by tobacco companies. There is a dangerous trend happening now and the World Health Organisation (WHO) anticipated that this was going to happen. Article 5.3 clearly described how governments should interact with the tobacco industry and the level of engagement that could happen between them and the government. That article came out of some historical antecedents and perspectives that over the years the tobacco industry had always wanted to influence any effort to put in place appropriate laws and regulations. Tobacco companies should not be involved in every process at regulating the industry, at enacting and enforcing policies.

But the tobacco companies in Nigeria have now moved beyond underhand attempts at manipulating the processes and they are becoming more and more visible. It was shameful to hear a Nigerian delegate took the floor (I was also a delegate representing Nigerian government) to tell the world that tobacco is not addictive. The most incredible thing that you could ever hear was actually said by a delegate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. People were shocked because that completely negates our historical submissions. I think the Nigerian government needs to be more careful and people should be made accountable for their conducts. We expect that the government will set up a panel to examine what actually transpired in India; that the Nigerian government would have examined all presentations and submissions that were made by the delegates representing us and that whoever must have crossed the line should be made to face the music. We will continue to put pressure that they are brought to justice. We will continue to work and agitate with every government to ensure that the tobacco industry is held accountable for all their unlawful acts in Nigeria.

With the bureaucracy in government, how soon do you see the regulations for effective implementation of the National Tobacco Control Act in place?
The regulations were appropriately debated and adopted at three different meetings of the national tobacco control committee. We want the regulations to have been passed as Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) but the best we can do is continue to put pressure on the bureaucracies in government. We know it has to pass through several listings and departments, which I believe the ministry is working on and the best we can do is to continue to assist them to mount pressure to hasten the process till the regulation is passed. Contrary to what the tobacco industry allies are putting in the media, the process is on. Every provision according to the law is being followed step by step. What needed to be done is being done. The committee has passed it to the minister as a prerogative of the minister to act on it and we will continue to mount pressure on the minister to get that into parliament as soon as possible.

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