It has always been a controversial affair, this habit that turns men into walking chimneys and roasts their lungs. But not even Christopher Columbus’s men who popularized this weed-puffing lifestyle in the course of their famous exploration in the Americas would ever imagine the extinguisher dangling over this multibillion dollar business today. The future does look bleak for this industry.
The British American Tobacco in Nigeria (BATN) exemplifies the trials of the tobacco industry in the country, and by extension, world-wide. In 2001 it made a glamourous entry into the country. Musical events, fashion shows, movies, campus games and a litany of other promotional events saturated the nooks and crannies of the country. It also threw their freebies to the Nigerian media, sponsored media-related events and awards. Their customers grew in leaps and in bounds and many thought that was the best business they ever could be.
And if the company’s executive and PR spin doctors were grinning from ear to ear over the above ‘breakthroughs’ in the wake of the New Millennium, they could as well Have been leaping for joy at the government’s pampering. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was infact the one who made overtures to the BAT, bringing them into the country as one of the then highly sought after foreign investors. They then bought the controlling shares of the moribund Nigeria Tobacco Company (NTC). Tax waivers, special duty concessions and several mouth-watering incentives by the government of the day saw that their business thrived. At a highly celebrated event in June 2003, the ultra modern, $150 Million BATN factory in Ibadan was commissioned. The company currently controls 85 per cent of the tobacco market in the country. The rest of the pie is shared by Philip Morris and a few others.
Meanwhile, BAT’s reception and general boost in Nigeria is a sharp contrast of the woes that had befallen the tobacco industry in Western countries in recent decades. Since the 1970’s, the heat has been turned on tobacco in the Western world considering its now medically proven devastation on individuals’ health as well as economic costs. Through huge taxation, libel suits and strict business legislations, tobacco companies in places like the USA and United Kingdom are bleeding to death. For instance, through a libel suit in the 1990’s, brought by 49 states in the USA against Philip Morris and other tobacco giants, the companies were forced to pay damages amounting to $256 Billion, to be paid over a 25-year period. That Master Settlement Plan as it is now called remains a fatal blow to their illegal business. Smoking has also gone down drastically in the West. It is the reason this multinationals have turned their business focal lenses on third world countries as a recouping ground with Nigeria as a major target market.
But if the tobacco industry thought they had found a nest, a respite in Nigeria, they never reckoned that the Environmental Rights Action and Coalition Against Tobacco (CAT) and several other fire-spitting tobacco control groups existed, for soon they began to put sand sand in their garri, to put it mildly in a Nigerian parlance. A concerted media campaign soon began, enlightening the public, through media conferences, press releases, and a novel radio magazine program, about the grave dangers that cigarette drags bring with it. Not done yet, they worked in tandem with state governments to drag the multinationals to court for gross violation of advertising ethics, for marketing to underage youths, for health damages on the population among other claims. At the last count, Lagos, Kano, Oyo and Gombe States had had their days in court with “Big Tobacco”. The financial claims are huge, ranging from Lagos’s N1.5 Trillion to Kano’s N1.6 Trillion. But the mother of all wars was the suit brought against these giants by the Federal Government in September, 2007 totaling asking for N5.3 Million.
To add insult to injury, just on May 31, 2008, the Federal Capital Territory decided to go smoke-free. In an elaborate ceremony at the Eagle Square in Abuja, the then FCT minister, Mallam Umar Alliu Modibbo, himself a former smoker and staunch supporter of the anti-tobacco movement in the country, used the World No Tobacco Day event to declare a comprehensive ban on public smoking in the FCT. That was the first government entity going that way, an imitation of global trend.
But if anyone thought the super rich industry would go down without a fight, then he/she is still blinded by tobacco smokes (screens!). The BATN, Philip Morris and the other big players in the industry hired the brightest and best legal luminaries in the country, most of whom were SANs (Senior Advocates of Nigeria) to go meet their opponents in court. The latter even refused to accept court papers served them using smoky excuses. So far they have put up efforts at delaying judgments, raking up legal impediments here and there. Gombe’s case was even thrown out of a Gombe Lower Court, but has now being refilled in another court. The lawyers on the other side are also not dozing. They consist mainly of young, zealous Nigerians, some of whom have worked in law firms in the United States of America and on their own have garnered the secrets used by litigation lawyers over there who ‘brought down Big Tobacco’ as they often put it in the USA.
But the reasons the wizened fortune tellers of the tobacco multinationals would have no good tidings for them are, more than anything else, moralistic. Any decent human being would detest a trade which kills its patrons. Tobacco is the single biggest cause of non-preventable death world-wide. In the USA alone, tobacco use has killed more people than all the casualties of the great wars the country has engaged in, accidents and deaths from HIV/AIDS in several decades combined. It kills five million people yearly with China alone sharing in one million of the mortality. It causes a myriad of diseases including cancers of the lungs, of the cervix, respiratory diseases, heart disease, emphysema, kidney ailments and several others.
They are currently about 1 billion hooked on the habit worldwide. The issues of passive smoking is another one that activists cling to, and which is bound to keep reducing the profit margin of the controversial traders.
Again, on the part of the activists, in taking the fight to a bigger frontier, the African Regional Control Initiative (ATCRI) was recently sited in Nigeria. Funded by the American Cancer Society and Cancer Research UK and hosted the ERA, it is the biggest yet of such initiative in the entire Africa. It was launched in Durban, South Africa on November 16. From 2009 the shape of its wide ranging activities will become clearer. The National Tobacco Control Bill currently making progress in the National Assembly, also promises very bad news for “Big Tobacco”.
By then, will the tobacco firms be gasping for life or cold dead and in the mortuary?
It is death by installment, if you like, a once vibrant stick, burning down to mere butt.
One flick out at a time…
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