Ahead of this year’s World
No Tobacco Day which is marked every May 31, Akinbode Oluwafemi,
director of Administration and Corporate Accountability at the
Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN),
sheds lights on the strong lobby of tobacco companies and the need to
have the National Tobacco Control Bill signed into law in this encounter
with Joe Agbro Jr.
A
meeting with Mr. Akinbode Oluwafemi of the Environmental Rights Action/
Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) is filled with excitement. He
talks with so much conviction and knowledge about the dangers of smoking
that you are held captive and cannot help but listen and reason along
with him.
Asked
why he is so concerned about the battle against tobacco in the country,
he says it is because tobacco kills about half of its consumers. But
regrettably, policies in the country do not address this development.
According to him, “when you look at smoking in Nigeria, you’ll think
smoking is not a big problem. But, I’ must tell you that it’s a very big
problem. And this problem has a link with how the tobacco industry is
being regulated in the west. You know, most western governments have put
in very stringent measures to regulate the practice of tobacco industry
and to ensure that smoking rate is decreasing. And because of those
measures and litigation, tobacco companies started looking elsewhere.
The developing countries, of which Nigeria belongs, becomes a very prime
target.”
Growing epidemic
He
is afraid that this smoking epidemic is very real here. According to a
survey conducted in Adamawa, as much as 29percent of the youths in that
are smokers, while a survey in 11 Lagos hospitals showed that “at least
one person dies a day in each of those hospitals as a result of
smoking.”
In
the absence of a national statistics on smoking, a 2011 survey by the
World Health Organisation (WHO) shows that there is actually rising
smoking among Nigerian girls rising up to the level of 3% a year. “That
is alarming and extremely disturbing,” Oluwafemi says.
In
the overall picture of insufficient healthcare infrastructure, diseases
such as “heart disease, cancers of different types, impotence, heart
condition, low birth rate, and loss of man hours at work places” are of
serious challenge to the health care sector.
According
to WHO, tobacco currently kills over 5.4 million people yearly, with
about 70percent of casualty occurring in developing countries like
Nigeria, adding that every stick of cigarette contains over 4, 000
dangerous chemicals with over 40 of them being carcinogenic.
To
combat this disturbing outcome, Senator Olorunnibe Mamora sponsored the
National Tobacco Bill which was eventually passed by the National
Assembly on May 31st, 2011, a year ago. This Bill, Oluwafemi says, was
“happily supported by Environmental Rights Action (ERA), it seeks to
domesticate the Framework Convention of Tobacco Control, a global
treaty, about the minimum standards that countries must adhere to in
terms of legislating about tobacco.
“Nigeria
is a signatory as well as a party. And since we are a party to that
treaty, we are under obligation to implement the provision of that
international treaty. The Bill seeks to end advertisement, sponsorship,
and promotion, it prohibits the sale of cigarettes to minors, it
recommended pictorial warnings on cigarette packs, and it bans smoking
in public places. More importantly, that Bill seeks to create a
committee, National Tobacco Control Committee which will serve as an
advisory role in terms of reviewing the policy. That essentially is what
that Bill is all about. I have heard people say that the Bill wants to
close tobacco companies in Nigeria. I don’t know whether they have a
separate Bill. This Bill has been passed and we are waiting for the
presidential assent so that the Bill can become enforceable in Nigeria.
We are worried that the presidential assent is taking too long. And we
are very suspicious that some people somewhere may want to compromise
public health and we’re calling on the president to see this Bill as an
obligation to protect the health of the Nigerian people.”
He
faulted the idea of mixing sponsorship with corporate social
responsibility (CSR), Oluwafemi said, “Tobacco companies are inflicting
monumental health impact on our nation. How do you mitigate that by
buying computers or drilling boreholes? Can computers and boreholes make
up for the lives of our brothers and sisters dying as a result of
smoking? No. So, what we are saying is that let government impose
appropriate taxes on those products. Why is it that a pack of
cigarettes is about six pounds (N1, 500) in London, seven dollars (N1,
300) in the US, and the same pack is selling for N200 in Nigeria? Other
governments have moved ahead to impose appropriate taxes on tobacco
products. Then, you can use those taxes to build the schools and to buy
the computers. And this time around, even the way they have conducted
themselves with the CSR, it is only another form of advertisement. They
only practically move their advert budget into CSR so that they can
always call government people to sit on the table and they can win
public sympathy.”
He
blames the non-passage of the National Tobacco Control Bill on the
interference of the tobacco companies. “In fact, we have it on authority
that they have started calling reporters not to run stories on World No
Tobacco Day and stories around the Bill. They know that if this Bill is
signed they would not be able to do those things that bring in more
consumers the way they’ve always been doing. So, when this is dragging
for too long, our suspicion would certainly be that the tobacco industry
has been moving underground as they’ve always been doing, not only in
Nigeria, but all around the world to undermine public health and to
ensure that legislation that are for public health are never enacted.”
He punched holes in the industry’s argument that it has a large work
force in the country, saying, “the tobacco companies are not employing
up to 1, 000 people. That is the reality,” he said.
He
believes that the true nature of the industry is hidden from most
Nigerians because “their business thrives on deception. They make people
to think that when you smoke, it’s good. And they will never tell you
the health implications. So, those deceptions were the basis of their
objections which were completely irrelevant because whatever section
that you have in this Bill are provisions that are just the basic in NTC
Bill. Take for instance, in our Bill, we are seeking 50percent pictures
on cigarette packs. A country as close as Mauritius is already
enforcing 70percent. Ghana is already thinking of about 60 percent. In
fact, some countries like Australia has even gone beyond the pictures
and talk about plain packaging. They know it that they cannot debate
this because the international community have moved way beyond what is
even in this Bill as at today.”
He appealed to the president to sign the bill and save Nigerian youths from the looming tobacco epidemic.
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