Let us snitch on unsafe goods

Gideon Nkala | Tuesday February 15, 2022 21:55

In and around us there are many more products that are being recalled from the shelves. A recall in one market affects many more markets. Every consumable product you can think of, from children’s toys, life threatening materials such as car ignition coils, medicines, food items and up to benign materials such as container lids can be recalled.

Most product recalls are voluntary and they happen when industry takes a responsible and proactive step to put the safety of consumers ahead of profit. This invariably happens when products do not meet the safety or health standards or the products are dangerously defective that they could injure or endanger the lives of users. When industry become aware of certain defects on their products and they are convinced that these could compromise the lives of consumers a recall is generally triggered.

With recalls becoming a common-place, consumers are concerned now than they have ever been. Conceivably, this could mean the market is now replete with fake and unsafe products. There is no denying that recalls by their nature are unsettling; they cause some measure of consumer anxiety. The regularity with which consumer goods are recalled though unsettling could in fact suggest that the market is efficiently self-correcting other than pointing to an impending consumer doomsday. Consumers should embrace recalls, it is a necessary safe-guard in the amour of consumer protection.

Increasingly there is a general improvement on consumer protection legislations that have product recall provisions in them; Botswana has added its weight to this growing community when it made into law the Consumer Protection Act of 2018. Of course, the phenomenal growth of e-commerce and the attendant global supply chain have played no small part in the widespread recalls of goods. E-commerce has helped to break down trade walls by facilitating global commerce while at the same time opening the door for some fake products and less than trustworthy business-people to join the burgeoning trade. This has created pressure on the wider consumer protection ecosystem, including customs officials (read BURS), law enforcement, environment officials, standards officials (read BOBS), health, consumer groups and others. The sifting sand concerning one global safety standards creates an enforcement challenge where some products are acceptable in some jurisdictions and unacceptable in other markets. Thankfully, global efforts, including valiant efforts in Botswana, have been invested in the area of common standards to facilitate recall of unsafe goods

Recall is often a collaborative effort carried out between Industry, public institutions including consumer groups and the media. The aim is usually to ensure that the recalled goods are completely moved out of the market as swiftly as it is possible to avert public catastrophe. Consumer protection presupposes that the local consumer protection network is connected to the global network including through digital systems to ensure that consumer goods that are marked out as substandard or unsafe in one market are immediately monitored and removed or prevented from entering the global market.

This is a huge burden to carry, which saddles the Botswana consumer network with the load to proactively police the market and weed out products that offend the Botswana Bureau of Standards and other international standards. This colossal consumer function can only be realised when informed and engaged consumers take up their responsibilities seriously by reporting defective and unsafe goods that are strewn in our market.

Recall is disruptive to both consumers and business. Unfortunately, recall sometimes happens after consumers would have eaten or used the items. Businesses incur losses when they subject themselves to a recall, they replace or even refund consumers. Worse, they suffer reputational damage which could tinker their share of the market. One of the worst cases of recall that springs to mind would be the salmonella contamination at the Peanut Corporation of America which led to hundreds of people falling sick and about nine deaths. The company never recovered and the business was buried under a raft of law suits and reputational damage.

Some of these products are used by minors and the vulnerable; we cannot afford to be nonchalant and complacent. Let us snitch on defective and unsafe goods- it is the right consumer badge to wear.