The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, or FCCPC, provided traders and other market participants who were using manipulative pricing to drive down the price of goods one month’s notice.
The directive was given yesterday in Abuja during a one-day stakeholders’ engagement on exploitative pricing by Mr. Tunji Bello, the Executive Vice-Chairman of the FCCPC.
According to Bello, the commission will begin enforcement after the expiration of the notice.
He said the meeting was to address the growing trend of unreasonable pricing of consumer goods and services and unwholesome practices of market associations.
Bello said: “The issue of critical national importance of the day is the growing trend of unreasonable pricing of consumer goods and services across the country, and the unwholesome practice of market associations engaged in price fixing.”
Being a proactive company, we have spent the last few weeks conducting covert market research all throughout the nation. Our findings are, to put it kindly, extremely troubling. Thus, the purpose of our meeting yesterday is to emphasize how serious the situation is and how urgently we must cooperate to stop this unhealthy trend.
As a legally mandated organization tasked with upholding consumer rights, we cannot for this detrimental pattern to persist. To be clear, we acknowledge that the cost of production in local currency has been adversely affected by an unfavorable exchange rate. But occasionally, the margin on the cost of goods and services is irrational or exorbitant.
For example, we’ve noticed that the margin on the prices of items imported is frequently wildly exaggerated, and the same is true for things made locally. This is an unacceptable state of affairs, especially in the retail sector where we have seen price-fixing tendencies, price gouging, and other anti-consumer practices carried out by certain market groups.
In her reaction, a human rights activist, Barrister Charity Onwuka, said: “This is very appalling really, another mess up by the APC-led administration.
Because the merchants purchased the goods or commodities at a steep discount, the federal government has no authority to pressure them into crashing prices. She claims that because traders will prefer to stockpile their commodities than sell them at a very low price, which will be detrimental to them, this will result in artificial scarcity.
She said: ‘’The government should rather have a more practical and pragmatic approach to resolving the inflation in the economy.”.
‘’As a citizen of Nigeria, I suggest, as is being widely advocated, that the cost of governance should be crashed to the barest minimum and experienced economic experts should be consulted to advise on the way forward, rather than compensating political faithful and family members by giving them key positions wherein they can’t make positive impacts for the good of everyone in the country!”
