From: AllAfrica
By Ogala Emmanuel
Officials say fake cigarettes are huge public problems to Nigeria, heightening the existing public health concern posed by growing but uncontrolled tobacco market in Nigeria.
Since 2008, Luka (he declined to provide his surname) has run a lucrative business a few hundred meters from Sheraton Hotel, one of Abuja’s most prominent hotels. At the moment, he is operating from a jalopy white Toyota Corolla Wagon – the car’s back seat is the store, while the trunk serves as the shop. Before that, until he was dislodged by officials of the Abuja Environmental Protection Board, AEPB, he operated from a small yellow metal kiosk where he retailed a variety of items, making thousands of naira in profit daily.
Luka looks as if he in his early 40s, and declines to fully identify himself. But for the five years he has been on the business, Luka’s most priced merchandise are not the simple consumer goods he sells to Abuja’s low and mighty. They are smuggled cigarettes he tucks alongside other goods in a small blue plastic bucket.
Not only are the cigarettes illegal, but many are fake, he admitted recently.
“Customers buy them plenty because they are cheap,” he said, holding up a packet of a fake brand, produced by a local cigarette company.
Thousands of traders like Luka serve as important links between a growing number of smokers and smugglers in a booming illicit tobacco trade that is finding its roots in Nigeria’s borders across the northern states, where an expansive network of traffickers work tirelessly to compromise government officials before channelling huge quantities of cigarettes across the border from Niger and Chad.
Luka’s supplier drives around Abuja, dispensing cartons of cigarettes to retailers who pay him after sales. He then connects with the tycoons in far away Kaduna, Kano and Katsina States who control a largely unregulated tobacco market, likely the biggest in West Africa.
A 2005 study by the World Health Organization, WHO, estimated that more than 30 per cent of cigarettes smoked in Nigeria are smuggled. A more recent (2012) publication by the World Custom Journal claimed the volume have dropped to less than 10 percent.
