By Valentine Amanze, Online Editor
The Nigerian Tobacco Control Alliance (NTCA) has called on the Federal Government of Nigeria to operationalize the Tobacco Control Fund as recommended in the National Tobacco Control Act 2001.
The group, at a press briefing in Abuja on February 4, 2021, said that dearth of funding was hampering tobacco control efforts in Nigeria, hence the need for the government to take steps that would leapfrog the implementation of the NTC Act.
Olu’seun Esan of the NTCA, while applauding stakeholders’ efforts, which led to the signing and gazette of the NTC Act 2001 and the NTC Regulations 2019, reminded the government that operationalizing the tobacco control fund will assist in tobacco control programming in Nigeria.
Ogunlade Olamide Martins of the NTCA, while calling for sustainable funding for Tobacco control in Nigeria, decried the absence of budgetary allocation to tobacco control in the 2021 budget.
X-raying the health budget, he lamented that the N547 billion for the sector only represented seven percent of the entire budget, which is far below the African Union government’s declaration at the Abuja Summit in 2019, which recommended 15 percent of national budgets going to health.
He expressed disappointment that after dissecting the budget for health, each Nigerian was only entitled to N2, 735 going by the population current population figure of 200 million.
In his intervention, Akinbode Oluwafemi, the NTCA Board Chair, reminded the government of the worrying link between coronavirus (COVID-19) and tobacco use and said that the present happenings present government the best opportunity to invest more in tobacco control and ensure that efforts were further geared to ensuring that taxes levied on tobacco products in form of excise duties and VAT have a portion of them channeled into tobacco control fund.
Besides, Hilda Ochefu, the Campaign for Tobacco-free Kids Sub-Regional Coordinator for West Africa, also lent her voice to the call for operationalization of the tobacco fund.
She said that the Tobacco control fund would help deepen Tobacco Control in Nigeria. She revealed that the anticipated benefits for Nigeria when the tobacco fund is operationalized include new researches and adequate resources to control tobacco and challenge the manipulative tendencies of the tobacco industry.