The primary essence of the existence of the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) is that of regulating advertising in any form and ensuring that such adverts conform with the nation’s advertising standards.
Unfortunately, besides the challenge of non-existence of a constituted council for the regulatory body, a development that has hindered it from performing this primary function effectively. Underfunding has also become a big challenge for the body; since its paltry statutory allocation of N18million is always late in coming.
While the N18 million given the council has been described by some stakeholders as negligible and paltry, Brands & Marketing’s checks within the industry revealed that the council only received N7.8million, last year, which is 43 per cent of the allocation.
The investigations further revealed that the council’s funding, which had not been enough over the years, became most worrisome during Labaran Maku’s tenure as a minister. The body was said to have only fared well in terms of funding under the late Professor Dora Akunyili when compared with other regimes of those that had headed the information ministry.
Unfortunately, poor funding of the council in recent years has contributed to its poor monitoring and enforcement duties. This much was confirmed by Mr Udeme Ufot, former APCON’s chairman, while in office in 2015.
“We want to invest in facilities that will aid monitoring because the council has lost so much money as a result of lack of this equipment,” the former APCON boss had argued, frustratingly.
During the visit by the Senate Committee on Information to APCON office, Lagos recently the Registrar/Chief Executive Officer of APCON, Alhaji Garba Bello Kankarofi, expressed the agency’s helplessness to the lawmakers, while appealing to them to intervene before the body is rendered ineffective.
Kankarofi had argued that poor funding had incapacitated the agency from carrying out its main duty of effectively regulating advertising in the country.
“If an employee is not properly motivated in the course of carrying out hazardous job like that of vetting advertising, it is obvious that he may not give his best,” he added.
He however disclosed APCON’s plan to send a bill to the National Assembly soon, detailing their numerous challenges over the years that were yet to receive the required attention of the lawmakers.
“We will be glad if the National Assembly considers our proposal and make it a law, because advertising is critical to the growth of any economy that wants to be recognised globally,” Kankarofi said.
A member of the committee, Senator Dino Melaye, has however, urged APCON to articulate its ideas and send them to the National Assembly, insisting that a huge number of government parastatals suffer for not knowing the right channel to direct their complaints.
“Some of them still believe in the fiat given to the office of the secretary-general of the federation during the military administrations that every financial issue should go through the
Office of Budget and Planning. They send their challenges through that channel and think that things will work for them. Unfortunately, this does not work in a democratic setting”, he added.
According to Maleye, the National Assembly has the power to make a law from a proposal emanating from any government’s pararastals, adding that if the general house seems too busy to handle the issue, it would then be forwarded to the appropriate committee to work on it.
While expressing optimism that the national assembly would do the needful on their proposal, Kankarofi disclosed that, “The job of APCON is to regulate all forms of advertising communications that are exposed to the public through the mass media. The purpose of such regulation is to ensure that consumers and the larger public do not get negatively influenced or impacted by these advertisements. “Advertising is meant to promote or to sell products, services or ideas. Especially, for profit making businesses, advertising is meant to motivate and mobilise a large number of consumers, which translate to profit for the person advertising the product and services. So, there is an underlying intention to use advertising to promote profit,” Kankarofi stated.
The APCON Registrar complained that practitioners had continued to get away with several infractions, as a result of underfunding.
According to him, Chapter Three of the special provision in APCON
Advertising code, which touches on advertising alcoholic beverages, had been constantly breached by the manufacturers, with the agency incapable of taking action due to paucity of funds.