Ehanire Nwokorie
- Health experts warn of the dangers ahead
By Juliet Jacob
According to the World Health Organisation, WHO, the prevalence of tobacco use in Nigeria has reached alarming proportions. The world health body also says most daily smokers in the country know that the habit is lethal.
Notwithstanding these frightening situation, WHO further says daily cigarette smokers in the country smoked an average of 8 cigarettes per day. Further, the global health organisation says 7 cigarettes per day are consumed by those in the urban areas and 9 cigarettes per day by those in the rural areas.
Shockingly, it says more than half of all current daily tobacco users, that is 55.3% of daily smokers in the country, usually have their first tobacco use of the day within 30 minutes of waking up.
But far more worrying, is the fact that by 2012, 4.7 million Nigerian adults aged 15 years or older had already used a tobacco product, a figure, experts in tobacco use say has doubled 10 years after, especially with the introduction of more convenient and addictive variants of tobacco.
Chibuike Nwokorie, is the Program Coordinator, Nigeria Tobacco Control Alliance, NTCA. He says exposure to smoke and its dangers in the country have reached very alarming proportions. According to him, the government needs to urgently arrest the slide.
“Smoking in public places poses a great problem in Nigeria, because you see people smoking indiscriminately in public places” he told AFRICA HEALTH REPORT, AHR, exclusively. In his words, the habit and the effects on no smokers is now a “big problem in Nigeria”
“The second hand smoker, that is the person around the smoker is exposed to all the harms and dangers of smoking and even the third hand smoker like that little boy working in that restaurant/hotel, that after someone might have smoked in a room and left, and within few minutes or hours and he might have come to clean and arrange the room and will inhale the smoke. He was not there when the smoke was taken, but the smoke will stay”
Nwokorie however said it is gratifying that in some hotels today in the country, they don’t allow you to smoke. “I was in a hotel in Kano last year and they said if they see anybody smoking, they will fine the person, because they will have to lock that room for three days before letting another person into the room” So I know and am certain that smoking is a very dangerous thing.
According to AHR sources, it was in a bid to help arrest the worsening recourse to smoke and exposure of others to the dangers of secondhand smoke, that the National Tobacco Act 2015 was passed and the Tobacco Control Regulations of 2019 were approved by the National Assembly.
Nwokorie says enforcement of these legislations have not been impressive. “Well I won’t say is effective as ought to be, but a lot of grounds have been covered. I know that there has been some enforcement but we know that most of all these things, need political will, some of them need logistical support” to become effective, he said.
On the good side, he said, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, FCPC, former CPC had carried out some enforcement raids on public places in Lagos, Port Harcourt and in the Abuja FCT. “We need to see more raids and enforcements carried out for greater results to occur” Nwokorie said adding “we need to see more smokers moving from knowledge to habit change”
Queen Ali is about 32 years old and a first-time mother. She lives in Dutse Baupma, a rusty settlement in a suburb of Abuja metropolis. She told AHR that she started smoking because of friends. According to her, “I smoke most times when am angry, and when I smoke it calms my nerves, then I eat and sleep.”
Sounding pontifical, she said “I have never smoked in front of my child, in fact, I can never do so” but she admits that “I did smoke when I was a nursing mother at least once or twice in two to three weeks.”
She also boasts that, “I have never had any health issues because of smoking” even suggesting that “it all depends on the kind of smoke” before claiming emphatically that, “as for me, I have never had any health issues since I started smoking”
But a health practitioner working with Youth Arise in Abuja, a Non- Governmental Organisation, NGO, working on adolescents’ reproductive health countered her claims. Isang Inyang said smokers like her do not know the harm they are bringing on to themselves with their habit.”
“This is their usual claim, truth is, they are not in a position to know the harm they are causing themselves in the immediate and more in the future” he said, “many of them suffer prolonged unnoticed respiratory difficulties, they only don’t link the two things, and in the long run they suffer other health complications”
For a nursing mother he said, it is not likely that her child living with her in the same environment may already be suffering from her addiction. “Of course, she has not deliberately tested that poor child to know if there are problems now as a result of her habit, what I can say for sure is that if she does not stop smoking now, herself and her child may suffer complications over time”
It is to avoid situations like the one above that Nwokorie says “Nigeria should prioritize implementation of the National Tobacco Control Act and the other regulations, because all aspects of those two policies, the law and the regulations are so important for effective tobacco control in Nigeria.
“So I will not say prioritize on this or on that but all of them, Nigeria should prioritize enforcement of the Act and the regulations, that is very important, I can’t talk about one and leave the rest, they are interwoven, if I talk about smoking in public places, what about graphic health warning and taxation etc. So, Nigeria should prioritize the enforcement of the entire act and regulations” he added.
