Stop Confusing Ghanaian Consumers!

Consumer alerts issued recently by the Food and Drugs Board (FDB) in respect of some identified fake medicines in the marketplace has been deemed inappropriate and confusing by the Consumer Partnership (The COP), a consumer protection organization in Ghana.

With the majority of Ghanaian consumers being illiterate and the literate folks not savvy enough to read the labels on products and moreso expiry dates and batch codes, the FDB alert on March 12, 2010, cited the names of the products as Cipro-Dor (Ciprofloxacin Hydrochloride) and Clavu-Dor (Amoxicilin 500mg and Cluvulanic Acid 125mg) the name of the manufacturers. There were no images of the products empahsizing the details Ghanaian consumers should be looking out for when purchasing such products. Worst of all, mobile phone numbers were cited as hotlines.

Four days later, on March 16, 2010, the FDB comes out to clarify the previous alert that it was only related to a particular batch and not the entire range of the mentioned brands believing in the assumption that Ghanaian consumers understand batch coding. The Pharmacy Council has an obligation of rather alerting their members on pulling off the fake drugs off their shelves so they do not reach the hands of poor Ghanaian consumers who trust that pharmacists will only sell them wholesome medicines.

The work of regulatory agencies such as that of the FDB require huge budgets for Consumer Education (CE) and Product Alerts and government must take cognisance of this when approving their budgets.
The Consumer Partnership believes that consumer alerts of such nature should be accompanied by full colour photographs of the products in question on the front pages of national newspapers. It is an apology to have regulatory agencies such as the FDB to put out such alerts and cite expensive mobile phone numbers as hotlines instead of toll-free numbers and set up control points in the marketplace. The pharmacy council must have a self-regulatory mechanism for following up on such alerts.

In a related development, when the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) issued an alert on Tuesday, October 27 2009, on the presence of some brands of tomato paste on the Ghanaian market which contain starch and sugar but are branded as ‘Pure Tomato Paste’ in contravention to the GSB Standard for Tomato Paste, there ensued a week-long rebuttal by FDB and an institutional debate between the FDB and GSB on their mandates instead of embarking on consumer education regarding the brands on the market that were unsafe or did not meet the GSB Standard.

According to Jean Lukaz, a Consumer Advocate, consumers in Ghana are being taken for granted by the very institutions that have the mandate to protect them from unscrupulous business people in the marketplace. This, he said, is the result of very little, ineffective, misguided or no consumer education being carried out by these institutions. When consumer forums are organised by some of these institutions, they are elitist in nature and do not give the ordinary poor consumer a voice given the duration, atmosphere, language and location restrictions, he added.