MAKING THE CUSTOMER KING AGAIN

The customer, they say is king, but in Nigeria, customers can be likened to slaves, a reflection of the many years of poor service delivery they have endured in a country where fraud, deception and unwholesome business practices in the marketplace have been robbing them of their hard earned income and for which they are unable to get any satisfactory redress. The scenarios abound. Recently, social media was agog, with many Nigerian travellers expressing their frustrations about the services of Arik Air following days of prolonged flight delays and outright cancellations of flights which had already been paid for without adequate prior notification of the customers nor any provision made for their compensation. To be fair to Arik, this is a phenomenon common to all the airline operators in an industry where indiscriminate adjustments of flight schedules without apologies are a norm. There are frequent reports of people purchasing beverages and finding foreign and dangerous items inside them. Petrol filling stations adjust their pumps to under supply unsuspecting buyers. Fake drugs are dispensed to patients at hospitals and pharmacy shops which have led to many medically mysterious deaths. Electricity consumers are forced to pay monthly bills for services they have never enjoyed. Indeed, officials of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, who have since stopped reading the customers’ meters to ascertain consumption rates, now allocate bills arbitrarily and will not respond to reported service disruptions except they are bribed. It is a similar situation with telephone subscribers who for years have suffered from poor quality of service, inordinate billing and poor customer service. The non-existence of, or ineffectiveness, of warranties for items purchased in the open market which is often flooded with substandard products, is another headache the Nigerian consumer has endured. Service delivery in the public sector is at an embarrassing low. This is despite the introduction by the Head of Service some years ago, of SERVICOM, a public sector service pact with Nigerians. To access a service as simple as seeing a doctor in a public hospital, one has to contend with the abysmally poor infrastructure and the lackadaisical conduct of the staff. Police and emergency service do not respond to emergency calls, and when you have to visit their premises, you are made to leaf through layers of bureaucracy and administrative bottlenecks. Middle men and touts have since taken over the process for obtaining international passports and driver’s licences, and when there is service failure, there is essentially nobody to turn to with those who attempt to institute legal action fighting long and often inconclusive battles. But the consumer ought to be king. The reality of life is that service providers and consumers will never be able to agree on what the rights of the consumer are nor on the benchmarks for measuring compliance to these rights. Therefore, the intervention of a third party, most likely an enforcing government agency, is needed to help set the standards and enforce its dictates when either party has faltered. In Nigeria, consumer protection regime is still at its infancy; despite the presence of various government agencies involved in regulation of specific sectors. A principal legislation on the issue of consumer protection, tagged Consumer Protection Act, was passed in the year 1992. The act established the Consumer Protection Council (CPC), which was charged with the responsibilities to protect and promote the interest of Nigerian consumers and to prevent market abuse. Although the CPC is established as a parastatal of the government, by Act No. 66 of 1992, it only began to functionally operate in 1999, when its institutional framework was installed. In addition to the Act setting up the CPC, Nigeria also has a number of laws that provides for the rights of the Nigerian consumer. They include: Sale of Goods Law, Weight and Measures Act, Standards Organisation of Nigeria Act, Merchandise Mark Act, Food and Drug Act and Hire Purchase Act. It is therefore an irony that in spite of these laws, most Nigerians have not been enjoying the rights due them as consumers nor are the mechanisms put in place by these laws to protect them any effective. A number of reasons can be adduced for this which includes illiteracy and lack of awareness of their rights, absence of the political will by the enforcing authorities and recognised regulatory agencies of government to hold service providers accountable for their indiscretion, a judicial system buoyed by its many inadequacies and unable to make the laws bite. But all hope is not lost for the Nigerian consumer. In the 21st century and with advancements in all spheres of human endeavour, our citizens are increasingly making demands to be treated and served in line with international best practices. While it is cheering that the people are increasingly making greater demands for their rights, it is also incumbent on the government to ensure they get their demands. The government must reposition the CPC to make it more effective and accountable to the people. Other related regulators must equally begin to live up to their responsibilities in fulfilling the tenets of their establishment. Government should ensure that monopolies and other such anti-competitive business practices are discouraged. Furthermore, since ignorance has been identified as one of the reasons for poor customer right protection, government must also engage in educating the citizenry on their rights, how to identify unwholesome goods and how to reach the appropriate authorities to report service failures. Manufactures, public officials and service providers ought to also benefit from the training as well to help them better understand the standards that required of them, why they have to maintain those standards and the consequences of failing to maintain them. Finally, activists, non-governmental organisations and individuals have a big role to play by leading targeted campaigns to promote consumer rights, educating the populace, standing for consumers’ rights under existing law and promoting new legislation that will make the Nigerian consumer truly the king.

WRITTEN BY SYLVA IFEDIGBO