Across the board price cuts

When I first heard about it, I clapped and did a jig. Late last week, screaming headlines in print, online and electronic media reported that the previously little heard-of Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission [FCCPC] had given traders all over this country a one-month deadline to crash the prices of goods. The body of the story was slightly less sensational; it said the commission “granted a one-month moratorium to traders and other market stakeholders involved in exploitative pricing, urging them to reduce the prices of goods.” I was disappointed by the word “urging.” If it was only “urging,” why fix a deadline of one month? FCCPC’s newly appointed Executive Vice Chairman Mr. Tunji Bello, who announced the measure during a stakeholders’ engagement on exploitative pricing held in Abuja last Thursday, however said “the Commission would begin enforcement actions once the moratorium period ends,” which means it was more than mere “urging.”

After I finished clapping, I began to wonder: which traders is the commission aiming it? The traders in supermarkets, plazas, old town markets, “ultra-modern markets” recently built in some cities and towns, emergency roadside markets that often spill onto highways, large retail stores, fish markets, livestock markets, grains markets, fruit markets and stalls, small stalls, corner shops and abattoirs together must number in the millions in Nigeria. You must add here the young men and women in cities who sell GSM recharge cards, those men who hawk bush meat by the roadside, young girls in cities and towns who hawk groundnuts and other edibles, as well as the very able-bodied young men and women who collect wares from the markets or from receivers of stolen property, find out where there is traffic snarl and hawk them by darting from one vehicle to another with the agility of Olympic sprinters. Together they number in the millions. Can FCCPC enforce its order on all them? Is it not like a rainmaker trying to halt the rains in the middle of August?

FCCPC itself soon reflected on this matter and on Saturday, it issued a clarification. It said the Commission “acknowledged the concerns regarding the feasibility of the directive, given the current economic challenges, including the removal of fuel subsidies and fluctuations in the foreign exchange market.” What then is it talking about, since everyone knows that those two policy measures were directly responsible for the current run-away inflation? FCCPC said  its directive “is not an attempt at price control or a mandate to crash prices arbitrarily” but “its focus is on preventing businesses from engaging in exploitative conduct such as price gouging, price fixing, the creation of barriers to entry, and all other anticompetitive and exploitative behaviors prohibited under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA) 2018.” 

Look here, FCCPC. You either want to bring down prices or you don’t want to. Why are you hiding behind big grammar, as a possible escape route to allow prices to remain at their present exorbitant level or even to increase further? What is “price gouging, price fixing and exploitative behaviour”? I used to buy a small basket of tomatoes at N1,500 at Abuja’s Area 8 market and it went up to N20,000 at a point; what evidence do you need again of price gouging, fixing and exploitative behaviour? One packet of my metformin diabetes medicine that I used to buy for N9,000 recently went up to N55,000; what other definition do you need of price fixing and gouging?

Please FCCPC, go ahead and force these traders to bring down the prices of foodstuff, consumables and all other items. My only fear is, once you let loose your enforcement agents, you cannot possibly stop at the traders because, sharp-tongued that they are, they will tell you that they also bought the goods at exorbitant prices from manufacturers and importers and also paid exorbitant fares to transporters, apart from the money they have to dish out to Local Government-sponsored touts who jump onto the road every now and then and claim to be enforcing one edict or another.

Nigerians are very good at buck passing. The traders will shout, wail and swear that it is not their fault, that your agents must go ahead and apprehend transporters. At the slightest movement of fuel prices at the pump, transporters jerked up their rates. Never mind that their overloaded trucks, trailers and tankers ripped up our roads and smashed all the railings of our bridges on their way into the river, but they doubled, tripled and quadrupled their fares and blamed it on fuel prices. The same “luxury bus” that I paid N20 fare from Sokoto to Onitsha during my NYSC days, I paid N140,000 for one day’s use within Abuja city last week. Which other price gouging is FCCPC waiting for?

When you go after transporters, they will blame fuel marketers for the cost of petrol, diesel, kerosene and cooking gas, while the fuel marketers in turn will blame international oil prices, NNPC, MDPRA, shylocks Amsterdam oil traders, shipping companies, insurance firms, insurance brokers, port charges, Customs duties, clearing agents, freight forwarding companies, Federal Inland Revenue and its VAT office, and shylock banks that lend them the money, as well as Central Bank that fixed the high cost of premium lending. FCCPC must apprehend all of them up and down the country and beyond, otherwise the traders have a ready excuse.

While pursuing all these, FCCPC agents are certain to hear a lot of bucks being passed to airline operators. How can big trading firm executives move around the country and around the world to pursue their businesses when a one-hour Abuja to Lagos flight now costs over N100,000 when, in 1979, I paid N100 for a Nigeria Airways flight from Sokoto to Lagos, with two stop overs in Kano and Kaduna? FCCPC must kick the behinds of airline operators if we are to get some relief from high service charges.

Manufacturers, when FCCPC agents apprehend them, will heap a lot of blame on the power sector. Power companies are unpopular everywhere. During a total power blackout in New York City in 1977, the city’s first power failure since 1931, TIME magazine described Consolidated Edison, the power supplier, as “the company New Yorkers love to hate.” In Nigeria too, the Discos are very unpopular, especially after they visited us with Band A tariffs. Look, FCCPC should force the Discos to place all of us on Band F. I know however that they say it is not their fault and they will pass the buck to TCN and Gencos, which in turn will blame Nigeria Gas Company and the oil majors for the high cost and erratic supply of gas, while the oil majors will turn around and blame pipeline vandals and oil bunkerers for saddling them with huge losses.

Before FCCPC forgets, it is not only traders, transporters, airlines, Discos and Gencos that are engaged in price gouging and fixing. After you finish with them, please come to private school operators. Some of them charge more than a million per term for a primary school pupil, apart from the ones that demand payment in foreign currency. Why should that be, when the price of chalk, blackboards, rulers and pencils is still affordable? Have their own teachers not been told that their reward is waiting for them in heaven? They want to eat double share, here and in the Hereafter?

Next, FCCPC’s agents should descend on private clinics for price gouging. They force patients to do many unnecessary tests, which are very expensive, and they turn around and say it is malaria. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Dispenser in our town’s only Dispensary, Malam Umaru Dispensa, diagnosed malaria by merely looking at the patient and feeling his neck area. Are the doctors in today’s private clinics not competent enough to diagnose an illness without costly blood tests, X rays, CT scans, echo scans and even Magnetic Resonance Imaging? It is price gouging, I tell you.

GSM and Internet service providers must be visited with FCCPC’s wrath because they are responsible for a lot of our present economic misery. The White people who invented mobile phones and laptop computers collaborated with Microsoft  and other software engineers to ensure that our entire young generations are addicted to them. They smile to their banks with hundreds of billions in profits every year, and it is hard-pressed parents that bear the brunt. Why is it that in many cities, phone thieves are ready to kill people just to snatch their phones, because it is so expensive? FCCPC should ensure that phones and other gadgets as well as phone credits and data charges are so cheap that thieves will no longer covet them.

There are two other price gougers that I do not want FCCPC to forget in its current price control effort. One of them is Yahoo boys. All the money that we are losing to traders, transporters and others, is peanuts compared to when a Yahoo boy clears all your life savings. Why won’t we get, as a consumer protection effort, a provision added in the FCCPC Act to mandate Yahoo boys to clear no more than 10% of a victim’s savings whenever they manage to hack his or her account? Don’t they believe in renewal? Even wood sellers in our villages know to cut off a tree’s branch and not the whole trunk, so that the tree will regrow and they can come back next year for more. 

The biggest price gougers in Nigeria today are the kidnappers. Aren’t they covered by price control efforts? From a few tens of thousands of naira that they used to demand as ransom at the beginning of the kidnapping pandemic, they shamelessly ask for billions today. Is there any inflation more than that? Just to walk out of a kidnappers’ den, not in a car but on your own feet and without shoes, to breath fresh air, a person must pay millions, much more than a round London to Sydney air fare?