Puffing away 20bn cigarettes

All the sky above my head became blurred with imaginary smoke when I read the assertion by Minister of Health Prof Isaac Adewole last week that 20 billion cigarette sticks are smoked in Nigeria every year. Twenty billion! If all these cigarette sticks were to light up at the same time, I think Nigeria will […]

All the sky above my head became blurred with imaginary smoke when I read the assertion by Minister of Health Prof Isaac Adewole last week that 20 billion cigarette sticks are smoked in Nigeria every year. Twenty billion! If all these cigarette sticks were to light up at the same time, I think Nigeria will not be visible to the Hubble space telescope because this is more smoke than Amazon bush burning. 

According to the Health Minister, this staggering estimate of tobacco consumption in Nigeria was made by the Global Adult Tobacco Survey [GATS] in 2012. The same survey reported that 4.5 million Nigerians, or 5.6 percent of the adult population, are cigarette smokers of whom 4.1 million are men while half a million are women. Now, if 4.5 million smokers puff away 20 billion sticks in a year, then each one of them smoked an average 4,444 sticks. Divided by 365 days in a year, an average Nigerian smoker smoked 12 cigarette sticks every day. 

I think this is an over estimate. From the point of view of purchasing power alone majority of cigarette smokers in Nigeria, who tend to be poor, cannot afford 12 cigarette sticks every day. There is a reason why so many Nigerian smokers buy a stick, rather than a pack, of cigarettes. It is the pocket, stupid. In Europe, people buy cigarette sticks from vending machines not because they cannot afford a pack but because of convenience and also because they want to cut down on their smoking. In Nigeria, no one buys a stick of cigarette if he can afford a pack, not the least because of status issues. 

Speaking at this year’s World No Tobacco Day in Abuja last week, Minister Adewole sounded a bit despondent that this country’s anti-smoking efforts have not produced the desired results. He therefore rolled out more measures that government will take in the months and years to come. I have never been a cigarette smoker and I support all efforts to limit or even ban smoking, but I think we have made a lot of progress since 1990 when then military ruler General Ibrahim Babangida first decreed measures to control smoking in Nigeria.

The colonial era up to the 1980s was the golden age of cigarette smoking in Nigeria. During that period cigarette companies, tobacco farmers, cigarette advertisers, cigarette smugglers as well as smokers had a field day and field night as well. Nigeria Tobacco Company [NTC] at Zaria, the best known of the local manufacturers, had tens of thousands of farmers all over the country that grew tobacco leafs under its sponsorship. It supplied inputs and made advance payments to them which they repaid with tobacco leafs. NTC sponsored a very popular radio program on Radio Nigeria Kaduna, which reported from the fields in the remotest corners of the North such as no radio or television program does today. In addition, in that pre-television age, it had numerous Land Rovers that toured villages and did film shows interspersed with adverts for cigarettes. 

The coming of those mobile cinema vans to a town caused great excitement. During our primary school days, an NTC mobile cinema van will arrive in the afternoon and go round the town announcing with its loud speakers that there will be a film show tonight, usually at a large open space such as a football field or in front of the district head’s house. Hundreds of people will congregate at the venue, and as kids we often fell asleep in the sand before the film show was over. Those film shows greatly planted the impression that smoking was the coolest thing to do and that it was associated with success, cheerfulness and popularity.

In most corner shops and tebur [tables], cigarette was the most popular item on sale, far ahead of sugar, sweets and biscuits. Every big or small trader sold cigarettes. There was a wide variety of them. The most popular local brands that I remember included Mars, Three Rings, High Society, Target, Link, Bicycle, Mai Shamuwa and Gold Leaf. Most were sold as sticks; few people bought packs. Some smokers were too poor to afford even cigarette sticks so they resorted to begging other smokers for kono, that is, the last end of the cigarette stick just before the filter. More affluent smokers bought the imported brands Rothmans, Benson & Hedges, St. Moritz and Sweet Menthol, smuggled in from Francophone neighbours. Those brands were hardly sold as sticks but as packs. 

Up until the 1980s cigarette advertising was the most ubiquitous in newspapers and magazines, more than today’s telecom or bank advertising. Giant billboards also proclaimed the “glory” of cigarette smoking while brands were endorsed by celebrities. Not surprisingly, too many people took to smoking. But because many poor rural folks could not afford the NTC products, there was a cheap local substitute called huke. Its raw materials, from the tobacco leaves to the packing, were entirely local. It was so cheap that it was sold in circular bundles of 50 sticks which cost, I think, one and a half pence. Huke smoke was more powerful than that of NTC brands and just one stick of lighted huke could make everyone in a large room to cough. As kids we tried to copy the elders by “smoking” corn sticks. There was no tobacco in a corn stick but there was some smoke.

Before the campaign against cigarette smoking got to Nigeria, it was already raging on the international scene. We were aware since the 1970s that cigarette adverts on US magazines bore the warning, “The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking could be dangerous to your health.” The warning was gradually escalated over the years until it reached its present grim level, “Cigarette smoking causes cancer.” In 1992 or so when the US Government won a landmark class action lawsuit against tobacco companies, I saw on TV one of the US government’s  lawyers taking a dig at big tobacco’s most famous image, the Marlboro Man.  The image of that Western cowboy riding on an elegant horse after sunrise created deep impressions in our minds as youngsters. The American lawyer now said, “With this judgement, the Marlboro Man is riding into the sunset.” 

Nigeria has come a long way since the heydays of smoking.  These days I sometimes go for weeks without seeing anyone smoking. Prof Adewole said last week that government will enforce the tobacco ban “in prohibited places such as playgrounds, amusement parks, plazas, public parks, stadia, public transport, restaurants, bars or other public gathering spaces” and will prosecute the owners or managers. From my observation, the main places he should pay attention to are bars, which adroitly mix cigarette smoke with beer bottles. In most of the others, there is little smoking these days. 

Government also went for the jugular of Nigerian smoking when the Minister of Health banned the sale of cigarettes in single sticks. He said cigarettes must be sold in packs of 20 sticks only. Even before the recession set in, most Nigerian smokers could not afford to buy more than one stick at a time. Unless smokers find a way around this ban [e.g. many single stick buyers can pool resources together and buy a pack] we could see an 80% drop in current levels of cigarette smoking in Nigeria. It means only four billion sticks will be lighted in Nigeria next year, instead of twenty billion. Even our birds and insects will be seeing the sky more clearly.