by Jean Lukaz MIH,MTS
To say that government is not serious about Consumer Protection is tautology. To fathom that Consumer Protection Laws are a palliative for consumer problems is tautology. To state categorically that Consumer Protection Laws are the disease of the cure is tautology. To contemplate that Consumer Protection Laws are a panacea for consumer problems is tantamount to condoning fraud…and standards are not a topical anaesthesia for surgical equity in the marketplace but rather a bitter pill for both unethical businesses and irresponsible consumers to swallow in order to heal them from within.
In the second episode of the first of his four lectures of the 2012 BBC Reith Lectures entitled “The Human Hive: the Rule of Law and its Enemies,” Professor Niall Ferguson, an economic historian, professor of history at Harvard, and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, makes a number of observations regarding consumer protection, which the writer shares.
In his discourse, Niall Fergusson identified 'misconceived regulation' and the 'failure to apply regulation and the law' as one of the troubling aspects of Consumer Protection. All the detailed regulation in the world would not do much to solve consumer problems unless the immediacy of enforcement presents a ‘clear and present danger’ to unscrupulous businessmen and unethical businesses.
Infinitesimal Consumers
Just within the month of June 2012 the confidence of a physically challenged was shaken at the court of law in Ghana when the very presiding judge ruling on his case came in pomp, éclat and plaudit to set him aside up the staircase for His Majesty’s passage to the second floor courtroom. The judge’s cortege of police officers and court clerks bawled at this poor victim, a consumer of the Disability Law, to give way to His Majesty without the exercise of any humility, compassion and mercy on the practically useless Disability Law in this case. If the courtroom, where the law is served to consumers is not disabled-friendly, what is the usefulness of the effect of the Disability Act? This poor consumer wished ‘His Majesty’s pomp was brought down to the grave, and the noise of His viols:…that the worm was spread under Him, and the worms covered Him’[Isa 14:11 KJV].
Darwinian Economy
The much delayed Consumer Protection Bill, however yet to be conceived, has given much utopian expectancy to Ghanaian consumers in spite of the weak institutional regulation of the already existing laws. Given that we are in an ‘Election Year,’ the most unpopular government achievement would be to promulgate a Consumer Protection Law that could tighten up businesses, which in no doubt covertly sponsor politics and political parties. The consequential result will end in these businesses tightening up their political sponsorship and, practically, no government would wish to be the hero in this consumer epic, irrespective of political leaning.
That is not to say that it is inconsistent to suppose that consumers cannot have laws and rights in their favour. If the Hobbesian world dictates that law picks on rights [which are based on personal or civil liberties] and commands them, then where the law does not pick on rights the latter could have a problem with enforcement in law. That is to say that consumer protection laws that are not derived from basic consumer rights render consumer rights as mere consumer liberties, natural or moral as they may appear. Businesses may promote their rights in competition laws but at the same time seek their liberties when it comes to consumer protection laws. To recapitulate Thomas Hobbes, Consumer Rights are not Consumer Protection Laws. Consumer Protection Laws impose duties and responsibilities on businesses and the government while being preventive, whereby, they protect consumers from deception and fraud. If businesses fear the impact of rights-based consumer protection laws they will have the propensity to stall any processes intended to promote consumer protection legislation.
Consumer Liberties
If the rule of law, a state of order in which events conform to the law is paramount to the protection of consumers, perceiving consumer rights as akin to property rights that can be bought and sold is a no brainer. Whether the rule of property (property rights) or the rule of lawyers (rule of law) prevails, consumer rights are irrevocably not negotiable instruments subject to regulated or free market trading. Alluding to the rule of property is to swing between Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Hernando de Soto’s ‘Mystery of Capital’. If rights are considered only within the context of positive rights as recognized within municipal or international legal systems, then they are premised on the rule of law from whence lawyers are premised on rights defence, according to Niall Fergusson. Consumer rights then are premised on rights defence. Thus, if consumer protection laws are not formulated on the basis of consumer rights giving grounds for their defence in a court of law, consumers, consumer rights and consumer protection laws will become an entertaining circus of clowns, tamed animals and fleeting illusionism.
Dinosaur Businesses & Regulatory Expropriation
The most important and cardinal of consumer rights border on basic needs such as water, electricity, public transportation, telecommunications, access to finance and credit, are in majority monopolized by companies with a lion’s share of state ownership that are apt to err with a political veil and a duplicity of unapprehensive state regulation in the financial sector. In the case of water and electricity, at least, without regard to the law of unintended consequences, the Managing Director could publicly boast of consumers’ inability to obtain redress from the courts of law. Consumers, eventually, are the beasts of burden and the victims that bear their leaven of waste and inefficiency on their consumer monthly bills.
In their frustration, consumers and their attempts at accumulating capital as would-be entrepreneurs could be as revolutionary as the trigger of the ‘Arab Spring’ against such injustice and consumer-unfriendly rent-seeking capitalist government-majority companies: “26-year-old Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death in front of the governor’s offices in the town of Sidi Bouzid last December 2010, precisely an hour after a policewoman, backed by two municipal officers, had confiscated his only capital: two crates of pears, a crate of bananas, three crates of apples and a second-hand electronic weight scale worth around $180. His self-immolation sparked a revolution.”
Consumer Protection in Ghana is, eventually, becoming an enemy of the rule of law.
The Jungle
Consumer Rights under the law of nature may be rather personal liberties. Consumer rights are not naturally endowed as to constitute an inherent enforceability. It is undeniable that consumers in any society are born free and endowed with natural rights. The unscrupulous businessman is also born free just as corrupt enforcement officers of weak regulatory institutions and they all have rights endowed by nature. The right of choice, for example, was given man from creation with a caveat: the right to choose good or evil. Man by nature, endowed with rights but free to choose, broke the law meant to protect him from making the wrong choices. If natural moral laws were enough for the self-preservation of consumers there would be no need for consumer protection laws, a reflection of God’s commandment to the first man “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: (17) But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die [Gen 2:16-17 KJV].” If this should be deemed natural law as deriving from natural rights, then natural laws are meant to institutionalize natural rights. A free-born consumer endowed with natural rights will not live to see the force of these rights under the Rule of Law. This means that enforcement of rights as privileges is only possible when there are rights-based laws to go with them. But laws of nature do find their place in consumer protection but not explicitly reflected in the globally accepted consumer rights.
Consumer Education rather constitutes self-preservation without the influence of government or peer pressure from civil society than ‘objective-social-collectivist’ rights. However, some consumer rights are constitutional in that government has a responsibility to provide, for example, basic needs to her citizens, who are consumers of public goods and services. The Constitution, some believe, does not reinvent the wheel but rather turns it as Sarah Palin – neither philosopher nor theorist -- muses: “The Constitution didn’t give us our rights. Our rights came from God, and they’re inalienable. The Constitution created a national government to protect our God-given, unalienable rights.” Nevertheless, consumer rights are unenforceable in law unless backed by consumer protection laws. A worst case is consumer rights in international relations and international law, where industry (businesses) refuse to accept the existence of such rights if they are not explicitly backed by international law, another version of Ayn Rand’s circular theory of ‘objective-social-collectivist’ rights.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Ghana: Thick-Skin Consumer Protection
By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS
Where there is no consumer protection law, it does not really make a difference when you are living in the jungle. In such an evolutionary environment in nature’s farm, everyone develops a thick skin: from the elephant to the cockerel to the umbrella tree and even to the eagle.
In a dog-eat-dog world, consumers in the Third World and in some advanced countries are only protected by their own immune systems other than external Machiavellian forces that only militate against them in the end.
What is Consumer Protection in the absence of a backing law and self-motivated civil society organizations?
In Platonic and Machiavellian terms, having the appearance of Consumer Protection than the reality of its existence in the manifestation of laws and institutions and the apprehension thereof has become the present predicament of Ghana and Ghanaian consumers. Weak government institutions and the semblance of regulatory enforcement and their reality as lame ducks have become the enemies of both Consumer Protection and the rule of law.
Anyone used to mosquito bites is likely to be living in a developing country. In the same manner consumers that are exposed to most consumer problems are dwellers of developing countries, most likely to be citizens of a utopian Consumers’ Commonwealth for the Anglophones and anglophiles or a politically assimilated DOM-TOMs, for the Francophones, including francophiles.
Let us do some scuba diving by making a naïve observation of the naked perambulating ‘traditional madman’ in Ghana, who is discarded by psychiatry, that prowl the cities reclaiming the streets, excepting the environs of the heavily guarded ghost haunted Fortress Ghana that is ironically fully exposed on Google Earth considering that even Diplomatic Missions have been heavily smudged beyond detection and their coordinates undeclared.
Our traditional madman, like the moon, goes round and comes around in many forms: sometimes as a consumer, sometimes as a manufacturer, wholesaler, seller or service provider and at times as the government.
In retrospect, Consumer Protection has evolved in all forms in Ghana: sometimes in the form of political persecution or public scourging in the name of ‘Kalabule’ [consumer rip-off], or price control laws in a quasi-communist milit-o-cracy determined by Machiavellian ‘armed prophecy’.
Given this status quo, Ghanaian consumers have been anaesthetised by rhetoric, breakdown in the rule of law, deceptive appearances and empty pre-election promises ever unfulfilled.
The aforementioned traditional madman sleeps in the streets in rain or shine, fully exposed to the capricious elements and most importantly, to zillions mosquito bites yet he hardly contracts malaria. Is it because he has become immune to the bites of this minuscule vampire bearing leviathan parasites of political lies and unscrupulous business exploitation or is it because malaria is only a condition of the mind far from a disease?
Whether in limbo or out on a limb the Ghanaian consumer, it appears, has developed a thick skin. After all, regulatory enforcement institutions can be simulated as distinguished consorts of unscrupulous businesses. To put your faith in them ‘It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite:…’ [Isa 29:8 KJV].
To cry ‘Consumer Protection’ is all a vexation of the spirit and a chase after the wind, a Hobbesian attitude to life as a consumer in ‘the state of nature,’ in the absence of authority and the law:
“…think about how you behave: when going on a journey, you arm yourself, and try not to go alone; when going to sleep, you lock your doors; even inside your own house you lock your chests; and you do all this when you know that there are laws, and armed public officers of the law, to revenge any harms that are done to you. Ask yourself: what opinion do you have of your fellow subjects when you ride armed? Of your fellow citizens when you lock your doors? Of your children and servants when you lock your chests? In all this, don’t you accuse mankind as much by your actions as I do by my words? Actually, neither of us is criticizing man’s nature. The desires and other passions of men aren’t sinful in themselves. Nor are actions that come from those passions, until those who act know a law that forbids them; they can’t know this until laws are made; and they can’t be made until men agree on the person who is to make them. But why try to demonstrate to learned men something that is known even to dogs who bark at visitors—sometimes indeed only at strangers but in the night at everyone?” [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII, ‘The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery’]
Where there is no consumer protection law, it does not really make a difference when you are living in the jungle. In such an evolutionary environment in nature’s farm, everyone develops a thick skin: from the elephant to the cockerel to the umbrella tree and even to the eagle.
In a dog-eat-dog world, consumers in the Third World and in some advanced countries are only protected by their own immune systems other than external Machiavellian forces that only militate against them in the end.
What is Consumer Protection in the absence of a backing law and self-motivated civil society organizations?
In Platonic and Machiavellian terms, having the appearance of Consumer Protection than the reality of its existence in the manifestation of laws and institutions and the apprehension thereof has become the present predicament of Ghana and Ghanaian consumers. Weak government institutions and the semblance of regulatory enforcement and their reality as lame ducks have become the enemies of both Consumer Protection and the rule of law.
Anyone used to mosquito bites is likely to be living in a developing country. In the same manner consumers that are exposed to most consumer problems are dwellers of developing countries, most likely to be citizens of a utopian Consumers’ Commonwealth for the Anglophones and anglophiles or a politically assimilated DOM-TOMs, for the Francophones, including francophiles.
Let us do some scuba diving by making a naïve observation of the naked perambulating ‘traditional madman’ in Ghana, who is discarded by psychiatry, that prowl the cities reclaiming the streets, excepting the environs of the heavily guarded ghost haunted Fortress Ghana that is ironically fully exposed on Google Earth considering that even Diplomatic Missions have been heavily smudged beyond detection and their coordinates undeclared.
Our traditional madman, like the moon, goes round and comes around in many forms: sometimes as a consumer, sometimes as a manufacturer, wholesaler, seller or service provider and at times as the government.
In retrospect, Consumer Protection has evolved in all forms in Ghana: sometimes in the form of political persecution or public scourging in the name of ‘Kalabule’ [consumer rip-off], or price control laws in a quasi-communist milit-o-cracy determined by Machiavellian ‘armed prophecy’.
Given this status quo, Ghanaian consumers have been anaesthetised by rhetoric, breakdown in the rule of law, deceptive appearances and empty pre-election promises ever unfulfilled.
The aforementioned traditional madman sleeps in the streets in rain or shine, fully exposed to the capricious elements and most importantly, to zillions mosquito bites yet he hardly contracts malaria. Is it because he has become immune to the bites of this minuscule vampire bearing leviathan parasites of political lies and unscrupulous business exploitation or is it because malaria is only a condition of the mind far from a disease?
Whether in limbo or out on a limb the Ghanaian consumer, it appears, has developed a thick skin. After all, regulatory enforcement institutions can be simulated as distinguished consorts of unscrupulous businesses. To put your faith in them ‘It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite:…’ [Isa 29:8 KJV].
To cry ‘Consumer Protection’ is all a vexation of the spirit and a chase after the wind, a Hobbesian attitude to life as a consumer in ‘the state of nature,’ in the absence of authority and the law:
“…think about how you behave: when going on a journey, you arm yourself, and try not to go alone; when going to sleep, you lock your doors; even inside your own house you lock your chests; and you do all this when you know that there are laws, and armed public officers of the law, to revenge any harms that are done to you. Ask yourself: what opinion do you have of your fellow subjects when you ride armed? Of your fellow citizens when you lock your doors? Of your children and servants when you lock your chests? In all this, don’t you accuse mankind as much by your actions as I do by my words? Actually, neither of us is criticizing man’s nature. The desires and other passions of men aren’t sinful in themselves. Nor are actions that come from those passions, until those who act know a law that forbids them; they can’t know this until laws are made; and they can’t be made until men agree on the person who is to make them. But why try to demonstrate to learned men something that is known even to dogs who bark at visitors—sometimes indeed only at strangers but in the night at everyone?” [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII, ‘The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery’]
Monday, April 30, 2012
Consumer Groups in Ghana Pledge a Unified Front
At the just-ended ISO-COPOLCO workshop in Accra on ‘Consumer Participation in Standardization’, the Consumer Movement set an objective that they believe will give Ghanaian consumers the boost of a unified front.
The consumer organizations present included The Consumer Partnership, Consumer Advocacy Center, International Center for Consumer Issues and Advocacy, Consumer Protection Agency, Consumers Association of Ghana and a Public Interest Law Organization.
The objective was to form a Federation of Ghanaian Consumers, Consumer Advocates and Consumer Organizations as an umbrella body with the core function of crystallizing consumer opinion through advocacy, research, lobbying and consumer education.
Commenting on the proposal, Jean Lukaz, the National Expert in Consumer Issues in Standardization, indicated that this move was long overdue as it was last proposed in 2007 but leaders of Consumer Organizations present at the time did not express any interest in it for fear of losing control over their organizational spheres of influence. On the other hand, others had felt intimidated by the need for transparency that may be required by virtue of their membership of a federation.
The present proposal was unanimously accepted and a maiden meeting was to be arranged to discuss and approve of the declarations, objectives and constitution of the newly proposed Federation and elect executives to lead it.
It also came to light that consumer organizations could not seek business sponsorship nor receive financial assistance from political parties. Even government sponsorship of consumer organizations need to be scrutinized if it is foreseeable that the latter may later seek to influence their activities.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
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!
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!
Thursday, February 23, 2012
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?
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?
Friday, July 15, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
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)
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)
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