Babatunde Irukera, the Director-General (DG) of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has explained that the agency has no power to regulate consumer prices due to the fact that Nigeria operates a free-market economy.
BizWatch Nigeria understands that a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without coercion from the government.
In a statement cited by our correspondent, the FCCPC boss said the law establishing the commission had a limited provision on price regulation which, if even it allowed the government to get involved in prices, required the commission to conduct research and make a recommendation to the President for a limited time of controlling price in a specific sector.
Irukera said, “When the President accepts the recommendation and adopts it, it will be gazetted. It will only be for a limited period of time. Other than that, we don’t regulate price.”
According to him, the FCCPC Act had provisions that prohibited exploitative or unjust contract terms, including prices but did not give the commission authority to say prices were too steep.
“Does that give us the authority to just say this thing is too high; this price is going too high? No, it doesn’t. What is not reasonable is not a subjective thing. It’s based on objective standards.
“What is unjust and manifestly so is based on objective standards not arbitrary. And it’s not just a number. That something cost N100,000 doesn’t make it unreasonable or unjust. And our regulatory approach must be methodical, and must be transparent and clear,” he added.
Exemplifying his point, Irukera revealed how FCCPC prevented the exploitation of consumers by a supermarket selling hand sanitisers and face masks at manifestly unjust prices during the COVID-19 saga.
His words: “We investigated one popular supermarket and what they had done, a hand sanitiser that was sold for N490 in the morning by noon, the price had increased to N1,400. By 5pm it was N3,400.
“We looked at their inventory, it was showing that they had 45 pieces left, but we couldn’t find it on the shelf or store. They hoarded that for the next day when the prices would keep going up.
“It wasn’t difficult to come to a determination that that was exploitative, manifestly unjust and unreasonable, because there was no rational explanation for that progressive increase.
“You could find a circumstantial evidentiary basis, which is important for controlling COVID-19 and COVID-19 is now in town. So, there’s a method and a matrix to decide whether something is excessive.”
