The influx of substandard goods from different parts of the world has been the major war the Federal Government has been battling with. The Director General, Consumer Protection Council, Mr. Babatunde Irukera, in this interview with ABIOLA ODUTOLA, assures consumers that the CPC is a safe abode in times of trouble. Excerpts:
Your immediate predecessor was very active in protecting consumers. Has the menace reduced since you emerged the DG?
I assumed office about five months ago, and I can tell you that there is absolutely no day that we don’t receive consumers’ complaints. A significant number of people are complaining.
Consumers should not stand for, or tolerate mediocre service or delivery; they should resist it. They should challenge the service provider or goods’ provider, and when that is insufficient, they should come to the Consumer Protection Council
What are your plans to curb it further?
We are actually looking forward to expanding the channels for people to reach us. We are also looking towards improving our technology right now, so that people can reach us right through phone calls, Short Message Service and others. We are looking at different methods of ensuring that when people are dissatisfied, we can certainly find a way to address their dissatisfaction.
Since substandard goods can also emanate from local producers, how do we draw a line between supporting local industries and consuming substandard goods?
It is more difficult for local manufacturers to produce goods that are substandard because they are right here with the regulators, who are able to get to their locations or plants with ease. So, the biggest challenge with substandard products is not really about what is manufactured locally because local counterfeiters, who also engage in exactly what overseas counterfeiters do, can be checkmated at the local market. But the problem is mostly with foreign counterfeit goods.
Don’t you think the local manufacturers of counterfeit goods can exploit the recent campaign for the patronage of made-in-Nigeria products to their advantage?
The call to patronise made-in-Nigeria is not to promote counterfeit made-in-Nigeria. We don’t encourage producers in Nigeria to adopt even foreign brands as their products. We go beyond discouraging that to also prohibiting it and pursuing violators. But with respect to legitimate Nigerian businesses, the big issue is not whether locally made products are substandard with respect to applicable statutory standards, as we are more concerned with counterfeits.
So, I don’t have any trouble with whether they are Nigerian made goods, which may be of different qualities from foreign goods, and people might have different appetite with prospective style, and might consider familiarity and distinction between local and foreign goods. They might have that preference for foreign goods, but that is not an indication of whether Nigerian goods are substandard or not.
What the government is trying to do and rightly so, is to promote consumption of locally made or domestically manufactured goods, so that our taste can become acclimatised. After all, the issue with foreign goods was taste acclimatisation over a period of time, and so, we can equally encourage and promote locally made goods.
What are you doing to educate consumers on their rights?
Since I assumed, we have been educating consumers on a daily basis. We also address complaint resolution. We have got all kinds of method and all kinds of channel. We have weekly programmes on television and use other methods of advertisement and use billboards to let people know what their rights are. These include their rights in the market; right to demand appropriate services; right to demand even the labelling of whatever products they are buying, and their rights when the product they purchase fails to work in the manner it is supposed to.
We regularly educate consumers in many ways, using local languages, as well as English language. And the Consumer Education Department is out there almost every week, whether in the market or at seminars, addressing students in various schools or trade associations. We have diverse methods of doing that.
What kind of evidence should a dissatisfied consumer present to accelerate your intervention?
We do not ordinarily proceed only in circumstances where there are some proof of purchase, or some kind of documentary evidence to support the contractual understanding between the consumer and the service or goods’ provider. That usually would become an issue, only when a goods or service provider disputes the transaction.
Generally, when consumers are dissatisfied, what we do is to forward that complaint to the service or goods’ provider; but what I would say is that it is always helpful to have some evidence of transaction, not just because you are hoping to complain, because in reality, those people who make a purchase, whether it is on service or goods, are making that purchase with the hope that it would work perfectly and they don’t have to go to complain.
How can consumers help you perform more efficiently?
I think what would help significantly is for consumers to be much less complacent. Consumers need to recognise that whoever is providing a service that they paid for or goods that they purchased is not doing them a favour. So, consumers need to first of all be very discriminatory, understand the intrinsic value in themselves and their choices, and the power they have in their hands, which is the purchasing power.
They need to understand that the reason anybody is in business selling something is because of you, and if you were taken out of the equation, they will be completely out of business. And so, consumers should not stand for, or tolerate mediocre service or delivery; they should resist it. They should challenge the service provider or goods’ provider, and when that is insufficient, they should come to the Consumer Protection Council and we will do anything we can.
In some circumstances, where it is impracticable to even challenge the service or the goods’ provider, we are always here, and we will be happy to do that for them.
Efficient service delivery is a tradition I met and I can’t see it any other way. Our role is to protect the consumers, and it is a fundamental, constitutional function of government. When government charges taxes, when government sells oil wells or when government does all the things it does to make money, it is for the purpose of things like the functions that we carry out here.
The Constitution demands that the Number One role of government is to secure and protect its citizens. It is the welfare of the citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, that was considered in setting up the CPC. So the Council is one of the agencies that government uses to discharge that very vital constitutional role.
