If you read newspapers regularly and you follow discussions on TV/Radio and even in the social media, the name Sola Salako won’t be alien to you. She is quite vocal in her campaign for consumer rights. She has been actively involved for years and she founded a foundation to advocate for consumer rights.
Sola Salako, who turned 50 a few weeks back, founded a group called Consumer Advocacy Foundation of Nigeria (CAFON) to defend consumers across the board. Last week, City People Publisher, SEYE KEHINDE spoke to this pretty lady who has a strong voice when it comes to consumer rights. Below are excerpts of the interview.
How far have you gone in your campaign for consumer rights. Will you say you’ve made appreciable progress?
Appreciable progress is relative. It will be a function of what we set out to achieve when we started this advocacy in 2003. It was by accident. I have told the story before. I was then writing for Thisday Newspaper, their Gliterrati column edited by Kunle Hamilton. I wrote a write up about my bad experience wanting to buy a telephone for my office. That was when this new CDMA Intercellular phones came out. We were looking for which phone to buy. We decided to call all the service providers to know what they have to offer. The first one I called dropped the phone on me. The 2nd one didn’t even know what they sold and the 3rd one was outright rude and actually shouted at us. So, I wrote about it. I said this Customer Care issue, why can’t people take it serious? That it is important and that if I am spending my money, people should treat me with a lot of care. It was a Sunday article. By Sunday evening my email box was full, with many people saying Thank you, Sola this was what I experienced. Everyone began to share their experiences. And I am like, everybody is feeling this pain and nobody is saying anything about it. I then assembled all the responses I got. And I published it. And then I got more. And people started to complain. And I became that voice and platform for them to vent their anger. So I started paying a little attention to it. My background is in Marketing. I understand the issue of customer care which is part of marketing. I realised that there was nothing within this structure that actually elevated the satisfaction of the customer or the protection of the consumer. Everybody did whatever they like. That was how I became the crusader. Then we organised this Consumer Sensitivity Award the next year, when we got consumers to vote in different sectors and I found that all the corporate organisations that won actually took out full page adverts to announce that they won and I said to myself: is this thing really important?
Thats how it began. At that time there was not much awareness, people didn’t even know they had rights. So if you ask me: have we made appreciable progress? If it is in terms of creating awareness it has been very successful because the amount of Nigerians who now actually speak up, or insist or even complain has appreciably increased. People are now aware that they have rights, so they can question things. The social media has also helped us. With the social media, people now had a platform, anonymous platform where they can push whatever they feel like and put it out in the media space. It has also made a lot of service providers to be more sensitive now.
They are like, they don’t want anything that will lead to bad publicity or bad press about them. So they now try to resolve issues. So, we have made some considerable progress. Is it UHURU yet? No. Very far from it.
What are the challenges that we are faced with that has reduced our achieving success faster?
Number one is the Structure. The legal and policy framework. The way it exist is very weak. It is not as strong as it requires for people to make use of. That is what we are still battling with. For example the law that establishes the Consumer Protection Council is the law that was enacted in 1992 and it was activated and implemented in 1999. In those days, there was no Facebook, there was no Online Marketing. The law is obsolete. The law also did not empower the CPC, well enough, to be able to do the work of policing the environment on behalf of the consumer. Thirdly, the law did not take into consideration that CPC was going to require funding. It can’t be going to raise money from the people it regulates. Because they don’t have funding, they are not very empowered, there is little that they can do. And they are the apex Consumer Protection Agency in Nigeria. We have reviewed that. There is a bill that is in the House of Reps and Senate also. It is called The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission bill. We have merged the CPC and Competition together and we want government to pass the bill for the creation of a commission, just like the NCC.
Apart from the Consumer Protection Advocacy are there other things you do?
I do that mostly now. I use to do a whole lot of stuff before but in the last 2 years I have just zeroed in on advocacy because I find out that I get the most fulfilment from it. We need to get more people involved in it. There is still a big gap in engaging government and getting policy structured in a way that will ensure that consumers are protected all the time. There is no policy of government that should go out without evaluating the impact in terms of consumer protection. And there must be structures puts in there to protect the consumer at all times because that is the primary responsibility of government.
For story submissions and inquiries, please email us at citypeopleonline96@gmail.com