My Warranty Experience@Compu-Ghana

By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS

After a colleague was ripped off at AFTECH Computers in Accra and managed to get his money back, a comparative shopping exercise finally landed us at Compu-Ghana. This was after we had made a trial run to Starlite Computers and Dealer Computers, both at Osu. The wet paint on the wall of the staircase at Dealer Computers warned me after a stain in my suit, the only sure notice of opening hours painting. A soft-spoken boss named Ahmed could only apologise and infuriate us at the same time by showing us a similar stain in his shirt by way of asking us to shut up. Well, someone else deserved our cash of GH¢1,500.00 so we voted with our feet. He only reminded us of the ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s comic character.

It appeared that Compu-Ghana had more to offer in terms of choice and budget. All was well till we were asked to pay for the Intel i5 Toshiba Satellite laptop, then the trigger of events began. When we asked to see what we were paying for to be sure, the sales folk were bewildered by the two gentlemen in suits that seemed to know their rights more than the rest of their clients. Why consumers are required to pay for their laptop while it is being removed from some warehouse is a case of ‘buying a pig in a poke’. A young gentleman later on appeared with a packaging in his arms, ‘Here you are, Sirs.’ And how do we know it is what we selected? The receipt only bore the code of the Toshiba Satellite Laptop without the specifications. I could not be bothered as my next move was to ask them to switch the machine on so we could verify the specs.

The answer actually required a trip to the Compu-Ghana Service Center located in the backyard. The reason for the trip was actually for software to be installed without our prior consent and not to answer our prying consumer savvy. The boss of the Service Centre treats every suit-bearing consumer as naïve and you could not blame her for that though. She has acquired her attitude through experience. She hastily filled in a Warranty Card for us to sign expecting some excitement from our end for their after-sales ‘irresponsibilities’.


Having chaired the ISO-COPOLCO Task Group on Warranties, I had just been given my favourite horse to ride. In fact, the Warranty Card of Compu-Ghana is a self-inflicting wound and tantamount to an unjust law and an unconscionable contract: it offers no warranty at all! What freaked me out was a clause dubbed ‘DOA’ [Dead On Arrival]—it reminded me of the morgue and the Death Certificates they issue to relatives of the deceased.

Wherever Compu-Ghana copied their warranty card details from, it was certainly not drafted by an expert. They have a new vocabulary ‘warranttee’ that requires certification, probably by the Ghana Standards Authority. The following Compu-Ghana-branded items were found in the non-biodegradable carrier bag:

1. a laptop bag,
2. a 2GB flash drive,
3. a mouse with retractable cable and
4. a rent-a-Skype headset.

However, clause 13 of their ‘warrantee’ does not cover any of these ‘gifts’. Clause 14 does not cover problems related to the software they installed at the Service Center but the consumer is not alerted to that for their prior consent. The Service Center staff asked if she could dispose of the card box packaging but when I inquired whether the very packaging will be required for claims against warranty her answer was affirmative.

It also appears that an unlimited warranty too-good-to-be-true is always a rip-off in disguise…ask AFTECH Computers!

Is there such a thing as Consumer Rights in Ghana?

by Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS

Never had I felt so stupid as a consumer advocate than the day the theory of ‘consumer rights’ was challenged at a conference for the fact that it lacked any legal basis in international law and in international relations. It occurred to me that either the consumer movement had got it wrong all this while or someone was wielding a powerful drilling tool, thereby reducing the issue of consumer rights to a complete nonsense upon stilts.

The ‘consumer movement’ went to work immediately to debunk this argument by extracting from UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection, ILO provisions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, which are all not legally binding documents in international law.

The moment the latter, bearing both first- and second-generation rights, was being translated into legally binding obligations, it was split into two separate treaties in 1966 [ratified in 1976] reflecting political and economic rights into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The first of the treaties, being political in nature, consists merely of first-generation rights that did not require any resources to be provided for consumers to be able to enjoy them. The second treaty, second-generation in nature, bore less developed enforcement mechanisms for rights that cannot be guaranteed. These economic and social rights (second-generation rights) seemed to be blurring off in the business argument until the consumer movement attached governments as constituents of the Social Responsibility Standard, ISO 22000.

These second-generation rights rather require the allocation or redistribution of resources and very often are not enshrined in state constitutions for fear of opening the floodgates to consumers. Only Communist Manifestos and Communist Constitutions go that far in enshrining social and economic rights. So what happened?

The ISO Standard on Social responsibility (ISO 22000) was opening the floodgates for businesses to return to their thrones of ‘Caveat Emptor’. Strictly speaking, industry was invoking an old theoretical argument on the derivation of rights that suppose that the only proper use of the word ‘rights’ must be in relation to legal rights. In a like manner, they were asking Paul, the Apostle, to turn in his grave and rephrase some of his to ‘O consumer, where is thy sting?’
Burying my head into the question of rights led me to the issues of sovereignty, liberties, privileges, immunities and the ‘non-existent Constitutional Rights’ of consumers, a.k.a. consumer sovereignty.

• What is a consumer right if it does not impose duty on others and thereby making it less protected than it should be?
• What is a consumer right if it does not create liability in others?
• What is a consumer right if it does not grant immunity to consumers from being deprived of the essentials of life and tools of their trade upon which their very survival depend?
• What is a consumer right if it is all about liberties that are restricted by other right holders?
• What is a consumer right if the sovereignty of consumers is surrendered by their adhesion contract of citizenship that only guarantees them civil liberties as designed at will by the state at any point in time?
• What is a consumer right if none is wrong when they interfere with or restrict the exercise of it thereof?
• What is a consumer right if its application to the individual is restrained by advancing utilitarian arguments such as promoting the welfare of the majority?
• What is a consumer right if it is not a political, socio-economic or collective right?
• What is a consumer right if has no associated responsibility in the exercise of it thereof?

ECG Dances in the Jaws of PURC to Spite Ghanaian Consumers

By Jean Lukaz MIH

Resolved: On Tuesday, 12th July, 2011, the ‘Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) Customer Disservice Series’ released a new episode. The story not being an original script, a wrong meter reading resulted in a bill of GH¢ 57,000 instead of GH¢ 2,700, resulting in a power disconnection at the premises of CIT SYS Co Ltd.

According to ECG, it was an enforcement policy to disconnect high debtors immediately, even if it is their fault for not delivering electricity bills for over four months, for making the wrong reading [which is no reading at all but an estimation by a lazy meter reader], and for short-changing a Ghanaian consumer.

Even with instruction from the PURC, it took altercations, bigotry, chauvinism, arrogance and a snapshot of the old image of poor customer relations to get PURC’s instruction taken heed to. The ECG power suppliers are Conservatives that really know how to wield their power!

The protagonist, the District Manager of the ECG Makola Division was playing Don Quixote, feeling larger than life, and boasting of his power to disobey instructions from the PURC and the ECG Director of Customer Service.

The melodrama was a scene that depicted the ECG disconnection team robots blaming the ECG Billing and Claims Department for the inefficiency of the latter and claiming that the only way to get ECG to act responsively is for wrongfully disconnected consumers to rather put pressure on ECG as they (the disconnection robots) have to do their disconnection work anyway.

After all the corrections are made and the PURC instruction was finally heeded to, who now pays for lost business income resulting from the ECG billing mistake and the wrongful disconnection and when? PURC?

The prophesy of the Consumer Partnership was true as it has come to pass that the PURC lacks the drive to enforce its publicity stunts intended to make the organisation look consumer-friendly. Making laws and regulations is one thing and enforcing them is another ball game all together. The process of enforcement must go beyond letters and phone calls to bringing to book men behaving badly at ECG.

Look Who’s Siphoning My Power!

By Jean Lukaz MIH

I may sound alarmist but certainly many Ghanaian electricity consumers have not taken note of the poor quality of electricity that we are all receiving- a situation that obviously leaves us short-changed. The truth is, poor quality electricity is slow in output and takes longer to power certain appliances whilst costing consumers more.

To quote Brian Hitchen of the Sunday Express, UK, ‘technically minded people will scoff and say it is a figment of my imagination. But I’m sure that my electric kettle is taking longer to boil and that my toaster isn’t popping up quite as fast as it used to do. The electric kettle element is not scaled with limestone deposit and there are no lose wires or crumbs in the toaster…”

I decided to carry out a little research on this for one litre of water, boiled in a one-litre electric kettle of 1010 Watts and recorded the following times for different times on different days:

0630hrs- 05:39:40 secs
0645hrs- 06:30:48 secs
0700hrs- 06:30:81 secs
1300hrs- 06:59:46 secs
1600hrs- 06:45:53 secs
1930hrs- 07:12:72 secs
2045hrs- 08:22:38 secs

Obviously, my small research tells us something: it is expensive and a rip off to use your iron, toaster, kettle or any other heating appliance in the evening but cheaper when you use them before 6:30 am and 6:30 pm. Why do we have to pay a premium for using our appliances during peak hours and less during ‘off peak’ hours? How come the same electricity supply can last 05:39:40 seconds at one time and 08:22:38 seconds at another time to power the same appliance for the same task? Try this at home if you are a savvy consumer.

The world consumer movement has long recognised that electrical energy is of fundamental importance to public welfare and the well-being of consumers worldwide. The satisfaction of basic needs is one of the basic rights of consumers.

Electricity supply in Ghana has poor coverage and poor continuity of supply as well. That is, many people have no network connection and many of those that are connected face frequent interruptions of supply and ‘power surges’. In Ghana, consumers are constantly having their appliances damaged by such surges, for which no compensation has ever been paid. Well, can the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) be sued?. YES! YES!! YES!!... and as a class action…

Due to this malfeasance of a public utility provider, consumers (especially businesses) have made their own ‘off grid’ arrangements, thus switching between grids or dropping out of the system. All of a sudden, this misfortune has opened our third eye to the availability an usefulness of solar power, no bitters required.

If the ECG cannot live up to the ‘50 years of Freedom’, why can’t other providers be encouraged to participate and unbundle the mess? Competition among generators can take place even within the public sector (as in Norway) but unbundling is frequently associated with the introduction of private sector participation (PSP).

Despite the difficulties there have been some relatively successful examples of PSP. In Peru there have been improvements in coverage (nationally from 52 per cent in 1990 to 76 per cent in 2003) and long-term reductions in real prices since privatisation of the principal generators in 1990. Chilean electrification rose from 53 per cent in 1992 to 76 per cent in 1999, relying heavily on PSP. However, in both Peru and Chile, much of this improvement was due to government led programmes to improve rural coverage in particular since 1993. There have also been some less successful examples. In El Salvador, the period since privatisation in 1998 has seen high tariff increases (64 per cent) while tariff subsidies have been diminished progressively. In Honduras, the relatively recent introduction of PSP has had little, discernible impact on coverage. On the other hand, there are relatively successful publicly owned networks too even in relatively poor countries such as Costa Rica where coverage has been very high for a long period of time, or Morocco where rural electrification rose from 19 per cent in 1995 to 39 per cent in 1999.

It is still uncertain whether unbundling and PSP will constitute a long-term improvement but certainly, we do not need more power for ‘free night calls’ on our electricity bills so that our kettles, toasters and irons must work not to the detriment of a good night’s sleep and our consumer power.

NEWSFLASH: Electricity consumers across the country can now take action against the Electricity Corporation of Ghana and its affiliate institutions for erratic power supply. A new policy by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) and the Energy Commission, which seeks to regulate the number of hours electricity providers can interrupt power supply in a year has been outdoored after the recent Public Sector Policy Fair. Good work by PURC and Energy Commission but is it just an action plan that was designed to be rolled out as an outcome of the policy fair or is it just a publicity stunt designed to make them look good?

Well, Ghanaian Consumers, time to get your ready reckoner, a calculator, a watchman, and a Lawyer of course! How do you prove power outage in your area? Was the wiring of your house done with 'To Papa Preko'? Have you not overloaded your limited output sockets in your home? Does your ECG Meter give you a printout of the quality of electricity supply to your end that sometimes go up to +/-15% beyond the 220 volts? Was is your neighbour that caused the ECG supply pole to fall down and cut the supply? Is it a monkey that was caught between the wires that caused that blackout...and you blame ECG for the jumpy monkey? What a cheap publicity stunt!

**(with excerpts from Consumers International (CI) research material)

Ghana Celebrates World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) 2011

Ghanaian Consumers Demand Independent Financial Regulator

By Jean Lukaz MIH

On March 15, World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) 2011, consumers in Ghana are adding their voices to the global campaign for fair financial services. The Consumer Partnership (The COP), in a move to restating the previous year’s concerns about the vulnerability of a borrower beware (caveat emptor) situation to shift to a lender beware (‘caveat venditor’) approach, is advocating for an independent financial regulator in Ghana far from the Bank of Ghana and its insider Investigation and Consumer Reporting Office (ICRO).

According to the World Bank/CGAP, there are as many bank deposit accounts in the world as there are adults. And yet, over half the adults in the world are ‘unbanked’ and 150 million new consumers join the market for financial services every year.

Consumers International (CI), the global voice for consumers around the world has issued a set of international recommendations for strengthening consumer financial protection to G20 leaders, the Financial Stability Board, the OECD and the World Bank.

The report, Safe, fair and competitive markets for financial services: recommendations for the G20 on the enhancement of consumer protection in financial services, calls for the establishment of ‘mandatory financial consumer protection bodies: national regulators with full authority to investigate, halt and remedy violations of consumer protection law, including, where necessary, the right to define specific practices or products as unfair, deceptive or otherwise illegal’. Among the recommendations are also the following related to consumers and their patronage of financial services:

1. Information design and disclosure
2. Contracts, charges and practices
3. The structure and functions of national financial consumer protection bodies
4. Redress and dispute resolution systems
5. Promoting competition in financial services
6. Measures to promote stability and safety of consumers deposits and investments
7. Access to basic financial services and the role of new forms of service.

According to Consumers International Director General, Joost Martens, "These ground-breaking recommendations are the product of a shared sense of anger within the consumer movement that the rights of financial consumers have been neglected for too long. They provide a clear and comprehensive set of demands for significantly improving financial protection for consumers everywhere."
The financial crisis dramatically illustrated that weak consumer protection poses a significant risk to the wider economy as intimated by Sheila Bair, the Chair of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, “There can no longer be any doubt about the link between protecting consumers from abusive products and practices, and the safety and soundness of the financial system”.


As part of her development support, the German government and its development agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) awarded a project to GOPA in Ghana from November 2010 to June 2013 to help streamline the microfinance sub-sector through Responsible Finance, one of its components. This is aimed at Banking Supervision, Financial Literacy and Consumer Protection and consists of technical advice, training and mentoring for the management and technical staff of the Bank of Ghana, the ARB Apex Bank and CUA in the areas of strengthening the supervision and internal controls of rural banks and credit unions as well as improving the consumer protection in the financial sector. It includes, above all, support to the planning and implementation of the institutional reorganisation of the banking supervision (incl. the corresponding consultation processes), technical support to the merger of selected rural banks and credit unions, and the strengthening of the Investigation and Consumer Reporting Office of the Bank of Ghana.

In as much as this is laudable, The Consumer Partnership believes that much more is required of the government of Ghana to show her commitment to protecting Ghanaian consumers from a product as complex as financial services. Over-reliance on consumer education, which is a necessary but wholly insufficient response to the problem, has not solved the case of weak financial consumer protection that is a problem commonly shared by consumers in countries with well-established financial services as well as consumers in countries where the sector is relatively new.

Unsafe in Any Currency

By Jean Lukaz MIH

Access to financial services is now considered a basic consumer right but the evils of banking and insurance and the vulnerability of poor consumers have grown beyond borders and continents. In Ghana, where over 80 percent of Ghanaians are financially illiterate, and this amazingly includes highly-educated folks, the financial services sector has been swarmed by predatory lending practices from those businesses pretending to be commercial, to the micro-finance and -insurance service specialists, to the non-commercial quasi-NGO (QUANGOs) social missionaries, to the grey area of new innovative mobile phone banking twists. Consumer naivety in financial services has even become a common financial joke in Ghana where consumers are said to always confuse ‘shares’ with ‘shirts’. The Financial Services sector in Ghana and in Africa seem to be loosely regulated by governments and businesses are just paying lip service to voluntary codes outlined by forums such as the Partnership for Making Finance Work for Africa (MFW4A) and the UN Blue Book on Building Inclusive Financial Sectors for Development that have inherent measures to curtail proliferating cross-border shylocks.

On March 15, World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) 2010, The Consumer Partnership in collaboration with the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) jointly organized a seminar on the Consumers International global theme ‘Our Money, Our Rights’, where a number of financial consumer protection initiatives by SPEED Ghana and the Ghana Microfinance Institute Network (GHAMFIN) targeted at the illiterate and poor consumers were also discussed. This had been an important step in targeting the non-English speaking population as financial literacy educational road shows and drama were conducted in local languages.

The best consumer protection is self-protection and consumers require consumer education to protect themselves in the market place. There is the need for consumer education on financial services to focus on financial capability, responsible finance, consumer protection, and the conduct of business regulation in Ghana. However, most consumer education efforts by government agencies are ineffective because they are in English only and targeted at the literate population who read one or two major newspapers. This leaves about half the population uninformed and uneducated. Consumer Protection Advocacy must thus border on the need for access to stable, secure and fair financial services, which is important for consumers everywhere, not least in the context of the global financial crisis. Government policy makers have a duty to increase consumer information ( ‘truth in lending’ for example), invest in financial literacy initiatives (i.e., consumer education), insist that the retail financial industry take steps to protect consumers (self-regulatory codes of conduct, for example) and encourage the development of an independent regulatory oversight body responsible for monitoring, reviewing and taking complaints. In order to protect consumers, the Government must ensure that consumers have regular reliable information on what services financial institutions offer at which price and what the risk involved is, so that consumers can make well-informed choices.

In a move to protecting Ghanaian consumers in Financial Services, the Bank of Ghana (BoG) has established a new Investigation and Consumer Reporting Office (ICRO) within the Banking Supervision Department (BSD) as the financial industry watchdog office of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), with responsibility for protecting consumers of financial products and services and educating them on their rights and responsibilities. While this effort is laudable, the government must be moving more towards state sponsorship of regulation instead of state provision since this prevents duplication of mandates as is the case of this new ICRO within the Bank of Ghana that is working with the same mission, laws and regulatory authority in all matters relating to banking and non-banking financial business, that is

• Bank of Ghana Act 2002, Act 612
• Banking Act, 2004 (Act 673)
• Financial Institutions (Non-Bank) Law 1993, PNDC Law 328
• Companies Code Act 179, 1963
• Bank of Ghana Notices /Directives / Circulars / Regulations

Ghana must emulate the example of the US in moving for a new regulatory authority specifically dedicated to the protection of consumers of financial services in the form of the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) that was eventually based on the recognition of the vulnerability of consumers to financial services that are ‘Unsafe at any Rate’ as concluded by Elizabeth Warren in her treatise in a 2007 article in Democracy Journal:
‘It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street... Similarly, it’s impossible to change the price on a toaster once it has been purchased. But long after the papers have been signed, it is possible to triple the price of the credit used to finance the purchase of that appliance ... The difference between the two markets is regulation’.

The ineffectiveness of the regulatory role of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) in the financial services sector has been exposed since 2004 when it directed all commercial banks in the country, to abolish and in some instances reduce, what it described as unfair bank charges and fees being charged by the various commercial banks operating in the country. The directive, which employed moral suasion as a regulatory tool, only provided a carte blanche for the commercial banks to further exploit poor Ghanaian consumers through extremely high and unfair interest rates.

The banking population of Ghana is about 20% and many Ghanaian households do not save with the banks because of the low interest on savings resulting in a gap that has gained Ghana the status of the country with the highest lending rate in sub-Saharan Africa.

With Ghana's interest rate currently ranging between 23.5% and 41.6% compared with an average estimated rate of 14% for sub-Saharan African countries and 3.34% for Asia's emerging economies, the present business environment promotes a let the borrower beware [‘caveat emptor’] approach to banking and financial services, which the UN Bluebook on Building Inclusive Financial Sectors for Development (2006) considers as a minimalist option that is purely ‘anti-consumer’. This attitude exploits uninformed and uneducated financial consumers and leaves very little responsibility to the lenders. There is the need for an enforced shift from letting borrowers beware to letting the lenders beware, a ‘caveat venditor’ approach as a first step.

Since the beginning of 2010, it seems that most of the global agencies such as Consumers International (CI), World Bank and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Consumer Policy Committee (COPOLCO) have gained a new consciousness on the exposure of African and third world consumers in general to the vicissitudes of the financial sector. CI used financial services as the theme of WCRD 2010 to raise awareness of the issue that cuts across borders not only in Africa but also in Europe and the US as the crises has shown. The World Bank Group is developing a Global Program on Consumer Protection and Financial Literacy to address these questions and help consumers help themselves, using a successful program piloted in Europe and Central Asia, the Global Program will be available to developing countries worldwide. And ISO-COPOLCO has initiated a process to gather information on consumer protection issues related to the provision of financial services, and the growth of new technologies and business models that have evolved in response to consumers' needs in financial services such as ethical practices in the provision of financial information and disclosure, best practices regarding the provision of financial services, appropriate design of information for targeted consumer financial products, questionable business practices (e.g. aggressive marketing practices, unfair contract terms) and liability issues, as well as mechanisms of enforcement and redress.

The global consumer, it appears, is not fully protected and is unsafe in any currency given the present practices in the financial services sector.
Contact:

Jean Lukaz
Executive Director
The Consumer Partnership-Ghana [The COP]
Jytlukaz-AT-gmail.com

http://www.ghanaconsumerwatch.wordpress.com
http://www.ghanaconsumerwatch.blogspot.com
http://www.theconsumerpartnership.wordpress.com