The Federal Government, through the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, has revealed its intent to initiate the implementation of penalties against trade association members found to be engaged in anti-competitive practises, as well as those responsible for arbitrary and unreasonable increases in food prices.
This was said on Tuesday by the FCCPC’s chief executive officer, Babatunde Irukera, at a forum the commission hosted to talk about equitable food prices.
He said, “We will continue to monitor the market, and where we find that prices are excessive or find exploitative conduct, or find that consumers are being taken advantage of, we will intervene. One of the ways of intervening is unlocking the bottlenecks.
“That is what I just said, associations that come together to determine at what price beans should be sold, associations that come together to decide that nobody in a particular market should take yam, beans or rice from any other person except their members, we will proceed against them.”
Irukera has identified trade unions that formed cartels to engage in anti-competitive practises resulting in price gouging of essential food items.
He observed that it was crucial to adopt a firm stance against uncontrolled increases in food prices, given the president’s recent declaration of food security as a national emergency.
Irukera said, “Competition regulation and consumer protection is not only to regulate the big companies. It is not only to regulate the formal sector. It is also to regulate the informal sector. In a place like Nigeria, it is even more critical to find a strategy to regulate the informal sector because, at the end of the day the vast majority of our economy is informal.
