The Executive Vice-Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, Babatunde Irukera said that apart of its mandate to promote market competition, protect consumers and secure remedies when consumer rights are violated, the commission is advocating for the patient’s bill of rights. Irukera also spoke on varied issues and ongoing transformation in the commission.
How would you compare the former CPC and the FCCPC as it is now?
It’s mutated and transmitted organization. First, the CPC has quite some parts in the law, but the FCCPC is far more elaborate. The CPC was a struggling agency that we wanted full Treasury funded and at the same time, completely underfunded. The FCCPC is now completely autonomous, not funded by the Treasury, unable to afford the work it needs to do so that’s a very big, difference. The agency has also moved through the years in developing capacity internally, developing its credibility externally, and its respect. I suspect out there, people knew the FCCPC more than the CPC was known and I’m pretty certain that businesses are more concerned with violating the FCCPA than they were violating the CPC as it were, because they understand that the consequence management system is far more robust and far more accountable than what CPC could do.
Your mandate seems to cover every sector of the economy. How are you able to do that?
We allocate our resources based on the challenges in each of the sector. We don’t have that much and that’s why we are allocating based on prioritization. We do not the deprioritize and foster any specific symptoms but when you look at what national priorities are, for instance, things that affect people that’s key, education, for instance, you’ll see us getting involved in investigations about things happening in school environment. Recently, Premier Academy took us to court in trying to prevent us from conducting an investigation.
So if people are going to entrust their children to you, you must be concerned about the quality of care. We were engaged in also doing college investigation in Lagos and the outcome of the cases in court with respect to Premier Academy, the court decided that the FCCPA not only just provide the FCCPA with power but actually mandated as a matter of duty to engage and investigate those cases. In healthcare, you would see that we’ve had a bunch of investigations; it was a premier hospital, Medical Center. Just one of the many food value chains; agricultural, lots of investigation in all kinds of other cases in the healthcare space. Beyond that, we have promoted a patient’s bill of rights and we were going from place to place in domesticating it and trying to strengthen the responsiveness and sensitivity framework of medical facilities for patients.
How has the lapses in the judicial system affected your cases?
It takes a lot of time for cases to be resolved and the amount of time it takes for judiciary outcome is excessive. But it is what it is and what we have done is to do our work the best way we know to avoid litigation but to address litigation when it does occur. Our cases are resolved quite quickly not really from the standpoint of how we will prefer them to be resolved but comparatively to other cases that are in court. So to some extent, the amount of attention focus on the intensity you dedicate to resolving cases in court are also factors in how quickly the cases resolve. Also, we provide the evidence significantly and when we are defending a case, we don’t go there to find all kinds of unnecessary preliminary objectives, we embrace the challenges and do what we can to advance the case.
Would you say you are quite satisfied with the Act itself?
I think where we started is a pretty good point. But from day one, you can see things we would have wanted in it but beyond that, we have operated something for almost five years. You will see gaps in it anyway. You will see things and operational maturity is where the law needs to be strengthened. Then thirdly is the evolution of society by itself. Changing dynamics in society also necessarily requires legislation to be able to cope. For instance, digital markets. What’s happening with digital markets, post COVID learnings across the world? We’ve discovered that there many things that we also need to include in a competition framework and legislative framework. And so I would say that we have a very good piece of legislation. We have a very good piece of legislation but also admit that there are things that need to be taught and things need to be corrected and then there are new things that need to be added into a proposal of possible future amendment.
How do you avoid overlap functions with other sister agencies?
Absolutely! There are overlaps and those overlap, sometimes it is natural. Those overlaps are not legislative failures. They’re not regulatory failures. They are model. Everywhere in the world, you can tell what a country prioritizes by the nature of the regulatory framework and so in areas where you find overlap, you choose the most important things. And so for instance, in food, look at the United States, for instance, consumer protection authorities, you’ve got US FDA, all kinds of other people to make sure that these things are safe. And so those overlaps are not confusion or failure list. What is required is for the regulators in the space to figure out how to bring their own competencies and leverage on what their expertise is, to make sure that things are done as best as possible because we’re young, and we’ve experienced pushback from other regulators. I’d say that in the period that I’ve been here, engaging other regulators and working with them hasn’t been as problematic as history of what it was prior to when I got here. But understandably, and this is the case globally also, that sometimes, there seems to be lack of alignment between the sector regulator, and the overall regulator like the FCCPC. We work on it on a daily basis to address these overlaps. There are strategic instruments also for instance, the FCCPAC mandates regulators to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the FCCPC.
In which particular area have you recorded more success?
It depends on what you consider the colour of success. For instance, one of the things people consider failure in a manner of speaking is actually a success. The biggest criticism we have is that there are many complaints that are unresolved. But you know why? Because people are now complaining and people are complaining because now people have confidence in the rights enforcement mechanism that exists and in any case, there is no consumer protection authority that’s going to succeed by resolving consumer complaints. And I’m going to get a pass mark on that because the better you do, the more complaints and just like you said, just look under the scope, we are everywhere. Just to take banking for instance. Think about how many banks in banking or Telecom, see how many countries, and then take food, how many carbonated soft drink companies alone, not to mention biscuits, sausages, and all of that. So there is no way you can have one composite complete regulatory authority down to a system that works for businesses to resolve the complaints themselves. In each company is the result. It is only the complaints associated with their own customers in far more manageable number and processes. Until we either encourage or push companies into investing and dedicating resources to a stand-alone complete resolution mechanism that allows them to focus on the satisfaction of their customers, we will continue to struggle with what is really the best complaint resolution mechanism. We’re moving there. We are engaging in that direction. Companies are becoming more sensitive to be responsive. But we would ultimately get to a point where as a matter of regulation, most are easily accessible and responsive.
I understand you are self-funded. So, have you been able to sustain it?
What we’ve done is to do the work, you know, broadly, deeper and what we’ve also done is to completely reject levying other consumers, so that we can develop a complete resolution portal where there is a USSD fee, the consumer space, tokens. We do not charge consumers for complaint. We also do not license companies. We don’t approve any products. We don’t want to take any monies from companies in the name of registration or licence so that we would not have any conflicts. We’ll be able to go against them and so our revenue is not really from them. The only fees we charge is merger notification fees. This is customary globally. Two companies want to merge and as a service in analyzing that, there’s a cost reflective charge to that service. That’s it. But the vast majority of the revenue comes from penalizing infractions. And that is restating the approach that we’re going to let you do your business. But if there’s something wrong, we would engage and if it’s very grievous, we will deepen the investigation. And we would conduct a very elaborate investigation and you will be confronted with what has gone wrong. The penalty is proportion to the real conduct. So it’s really about trying to work. Sometimes, investigation cost us money, sometimes, hundreds of millions to conduct an investigation. Sometimes, many years we’ve got an investigation that has been opened for this year and a half years and is not close, but just because the investigation was opened at least two years. So at the end of the day, when we penalize a company, almost always the companies themselves see exactly what the problem is.
I think all investigations that have closed only in one instance that the company file an appeal against our final order to the tribunal to reduce our decision and even at some point we withdrew the appeal of the tribunal. So the quality of the investigation would certainly be a factor in accepting the outcomes. So that’s how organizations are funded.
What we do is, we have a budget of what we need and being a government agency, it varies. We have a revenue policies where 40% of what you generate goes to government and then you’re able to budget up to 7% of that revenue. But our approach to budget means our budget is based on what we need. We’re not budgeting to fit what our revenue is. We budget based on what we need and we’ve repeatedly given to the Treasury. For instance, last year, we gave far more to the Treasury, that is, before we were completely decoupled. Last year, I think what we got from the Treasury was upheaval and that was in the region of N600 million but the Treasury, probably 6- 7 billion in the year 2023 even our payroll is not our responsibility. We are completely, fully self funded and autonomous and actually encouraged as done by the National Assembly to increase our revenue projections from the region of N14 billion to N20 billion but at this point, we’ve already surpassed the figure by at least, times three and we’re talking about only half the year already.
What have been the challenges?
Now is the capacity issue, both from the knowledge gap. Then there is number of people issue. We are talking about 230 something people and 774 local governments in this country. About 220 million people and everybody is consuming something every day and like you said, the money covers everything. So, capacity is one of the key factors and how quickly we can scale up both from a numbers standpoint, and then from a talent and knowledge standpoint , that is the biggest challenge. We have a very diverse, large country, covering the country and our customer education effort, just running the multiple languages. So finding the right mechanisms and the right strategies requires quite some dedication of resource and intentionality. Again, managing relationships sometimes can slow down some of the most important intervention required.
What are your future prohections for FCCPC?
I think FCCPC would become critical for Nigerian economy. We have a new administration led by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who is making some very tough and ambitious decisions in a very short period of time. I mean, of course, some of the associated effects will took decisions and some of the actions that we necessarily must experience in initial period but there some decisions that are very fundamental to our economy that can truly perform to its potential. And so, what we’ve done at the FCCPC, is to look at these decisions and also to look at some of the material that conveys what the administration’s focus is for the economy and we found what the FCCPC role is in the different schematics of the different tools, whether it’s how the regulatory framework is intended to work, whether it’s how to manage procurement, whether public or private, manage the current monetary policy, and some of the other things the document that has been released by the government as its roadmap for emancipating the economy. So, I think we’ve done that work. We’ve seen our role in it, seen our role in the Constitution and we understand what the FCCPC is. In the constitution of the Federal Republic, Chapter Four says it is the duty of government, the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary to ensure that wealth and the means of production are not concentrated in just a few hands.
What the constitution say is that shared prosperity is a fundamental factor in Nigeria. So once we’ve positioned ourselves in that way, and able to see a government roadmap, that shows the future of the agency and it’s relevant to economic growth.
