25% Of Cigarettes Flooding Nigeria Illicitly Traded; WHO Renews Pledge To Stem Tide

Nigeria’s tobacco control measures continue to take the hit as 25 per cent of tobacco cigarettes in the country are shipped under dubious guises, including attempts to ‘wash’ the declared national tobacco figures by local companies, according to Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI).

The TCDI dashboard — a one-stop-shop for tobacco data in Nigeria — revealed that the high share of illicit cigarettes shines light on the failure by the government over the years to track, trace and stop as much as about 6.084 billion sticks of cigarettes illegally brought in and distributed nationwide.

Data on the TCDI website further suggests “Nigeria produced 17.53 billion sticks in 2018 from where 585 million sticks were exported (equivalent to 3.3%). In the same year, approximately 71 million sticks were imported into the country, which means 17.016 billion cigarette sticks are available for the local market.

“However, assuming that there were approximately 7.64 million daily smokers who smoked an average of 8.3 sticks per day in Nigeria; according to GATS 2012, the total demand for cigarettes would be about 23.1 billion per annum. This would give an unexplained surplus, interpreted as the size of illicit cigarette trade, of about 6.084 billion sticks of cigarettes (i.e., about 26% of the total market share) illegally consumed in Nigeria,” says TCDI which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented by Development Gateway in partnership with University of Cape Town. The site warehouses country-specific tobacco control data to plug key data gaps and inform better tobacco control policy design and implementation in Africa.

In an investigative report exposing illicit tobacco trade in West Africa, Dr. Chukwuka Onyekwena of the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA) had submitted that “If 20 percent of the market in Nigeria is being held by counterfeiters and illicit cigarette dealers, then it would mean that Nigeria lost about N1.5 billion in 2017– based on estimates.”

For economies in Sub-saharan Africa, illicit tobacco trade leads to annual tax losses put at around $10 billion as 43 billion cigarette sticks flood the African market every year.

Also, previous findings had indicated that a chunk of the illicit cigarettes are being smuggled across porous borders while counterfeit tobacco products are equally shipped in by illicit traders to wash the officially declared figures, thereby exposing an average smoker to fake tobacco as if all tobacco products whether licit or illicit are not deadly wares to start with.

Tobacco Control experts have consistently warned that illicit tobacco trade amounts to double jeopardy looking at using both economic and health lenses; while it bleeds away accruable revenue nations should benefit from on one hand, it also makes tobacco products readily available to smokers, including minors as illicit cigarettes are often cheaper with sales and distribution defying local and international regulatory frameworks including the National Tobacco Control Act 2015 and its Regulations in Nigeria.

The World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO-FCTC) had at a recent meeting attended by Parties to the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products held in Panama, stressed its unwavering commitment to global efforts to combat illicit tobacco trading.

“Our meeting this week took important decisions on tobacco tracking-and-tracing systems and approved a road map to conduct evidence-based research on illicit trade.

“We also agreed on improvements for the reporting system our parties use, which will strengthen the quality of data on the implementation of the Protocol that can help guide future tobacco control efforts,” says Dr. Adriana Marquizo, Head of the Secretariat, WHO-FCTC, who also oversees the Protocol.

According to WHO-FCTC, illicit trade accounts for about 11 per cent of the total global tobacco trade, noting that its elimination could increase global tax revenues by an estimated $47.4bn annually.

Nigeria is a party to the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products — an international treaty which came into force in 2018, introducing a package of measures to be implemented in synergy by countries to stem the ugly tide of tobacco use which still snuffs life out of no fewer than eight million people around the world each year.

By ‘Dotun Akintomide