The Monitor (Kampala)
Solomon S. Ndugga
5 November 2009
opinion
I recently had an interesting conversation with the LC 1 chairman of one of the villages where the poisonous sachet waragi happened to have claimed lives of some residents. He told me how unfortunate it was to see his people die and yet he felt helpless. "It's terrible to see such things happening and you don't even have a simple lead to the person selling this crude waragi," he said.
I told him at least, someone should have the contacts of this person as he was transacting business with a number of people in his village. I was shocked to hear that little or nothing was known about this person because he just drove by the village, selling the lethal substance.
The government should realise that protecting consumers is of utmost importance. It should empower organisations to protect the public against unreasonable risks from consumer products, assist consumers in evaluating the comparative safety of consumer products, develop uniform safety standards for consumer products and to minimise conflicting state and local regulations and to promote research and investigation into cases and prevention of product-related deaths, illnesses and injuries.
This should be done by independent government institutions that should operate within established laws. Also, mandatory product safety standards should be established in order to reduce the unreasonable risk of injury to consumers from hazardous products; the outright authority to ban such consumer products and to conduct extensive research on consumer product standards as well as engaging in broad consumer, industry information, and education programmes and establish a comprehensive injury information clearing house.
The government was once again ambushed by a dubious "business man". Surprisingly the government has not come up with 'our official statement about this matter'; apart from acting through extreme measures of banning all sachet packaged liquor. If proper regulatory systems were operational, then there would be no need to act this way.
Consumer protection policy should support the aim laid out at promoting interests, health and safety of Ugandan consumers and be designed to ensure that the internal market is open, fair and transparent, allowing consumers to exercise real choice, excluding rogue traders and helping consumers and businesses take full advantage of the markets potential.
This has been done in other parts of the world. The consumer product safety commission in the United States, for instance, issued a record breaking recall in July 2004 when it announced that 150 million toy bracelets, wings and necklaces should be removed from the market and discarded by parents because they contained high levels of lead. Similar measures have been taken in China and the European Union. This is just one scenario out of the several to which we have fallen victim from misleading advertising and unfair practices, defective commodities, substandard building materials, poison packaging to opaque bank fees.
The government should therefore address consumer protection issues in order to build a reputation that it can protect the wanainchi from harm, in this cutthroat competition that capitalism has bred.
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