‘Politicians, political parties are becoming more compliant to rules guiding advertisement’

The Acting Registrar, Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON), Mrs Ijedi Iyoha, in this chat with AKIN ADEWAKUN, discuss issues affecting the marketing communication practice in Nigeria, especially the agency’s war against hate speech and unwholesome political.

How does it feel overseeing the affairs of the industry’s apex regulatory body, APCON, especially at a time it is living without a council?

I see it as an added responsibility I have to shoulder. And having been in the industry, having grown from the system, it’s not something that is too difficult because I have the cooperation of almost all the stakeholders and enjoy their good will. Though being without a council for the past few years, remains a challenge, there is nothing we can do about it. It is the federal government that decides when to appoint a council. The industry, especially the stakeholders have done everything within their powers to ensure that we get a council, but they’ve not got any favourable response from government. Several times, they’ve gone to the ministry, national assembly, met with the SGF and so on and so forth. They kept assuring us that very soon they’ll give us a council. So we are hoping. But until the Federal Government gives the agency a council, some of the challenges will still be there.

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Can you name some of those challenges?

Well, they are numerous. For instance, the induction of new fellows of the practice is virtually impossible now; since it is the council that has the power to do this. Besides, we’ve not been able to have our Advertising Day for sometime now. And, remember, it is a major event on our calendar. Besides, we’ve not been able to sanction erring members, since it is the council that is empowered to do this. Having said that, we still have a leeway, according to our laws, in the absence of a council, the minister can give approval for anything.

And that’s what has been happening?

Yes. That’s what has been happening to some extent, apart from conferring fellowship and having Advertising Day, which we have not taken to him, because we believe those ones are the prerogatives of the council to decide. But if we wait after the elections, and there is no council, all we need to do is to bring the stakeholders together and present it before them and ask whether we should obtain permission from the minister or should we just go ahead without a council. So whatever they say, the industry is for everybody.

Going by the huge volume of political messages and adverts that your agency has to contend with, how compliant are these materials with advertising rules?

The level of compliance has improved, when compared with what obtained in 2015. We’ve started the sensitisation program since last year so as to prevent a repeat of what happened during the last elections, when we had a lot of hate speech campaigns. We’ve been partnering with media houses, with NBC and even INEC to ensure that we reach out to as many politicians as we can, as many political parties, as we can and as many advertising agencies, handling most of these campaigns. And, a good number of them have complied. But where we have issues now are the support groups that you can’t even identify. Sometimes you see a board out there, and they put the campaign of a politician, no name, nothing and when we blank the politician, the man comes in and says ‘I’m not the one that put it there. I don’t know the people that put it’. So in those cases, we are a little bit handicapped. But where we know that we can identify the sponsors, we go after the sponsors. For those that said they don’t know, they’ve complied. But those that know and still decide to violate the rule are sanctioned.

So all the political ads we are seeing now got the consent of the agency?

I won’t say 100 per cent of everything you are seeing. There might be some that we are not seeing, for those that we’ve seen, I will say, yes, 80 of them.

But how do you monitor them?

That’s another challenge because we don’t really have monitoring equipment as such. What we do is manual. We watch TV, listen to Radio, read newspapers, go out to monitor billboards and all that. And that’s what we do pan-Nigeria, especially in zones, where we have our offices.

But what exactly are criteria you look for before a campaign material will be deemed fit by your agency for exposure?

I think my first response to this is that qualified practitioners must be patronised. That is advertising agencies that are duly registered. If you go through them you won’t have problem, because they know what the guidelines are, and they would not want to violate it. It’s only when you give your materials to quacks that don’t know what it entails to come up with a political campaign that you run into trouble. Our Code says that political campaigns should not be abusive, should not be disparaging, should be issue-oriented, and that is what we preach to them. So if you must forward any material, it must conform to the Code of Advertising Practice.

If it doesn’t, who gets sanctioned?

The media house, the person that forwarded the material that was exposed.

And how many of those sanctions has the agency been able to get?

So many of them, for the electronic media, Radio and TV, we are partnering with NBC to sanction them and they are doing that. Then we sanction the practitioners that we licensed. If you are a practitioner and you are in any media house and you are the one involved, that is you were there when they brought the material, we’ll sanction you because you are supposed to be a gate keeper there. That was the oath of allegiance you took when you were doing your induction with us.

And what type of sanction?

So many; it could be monetary, It could mean deregistering you and it could even be bringing you before a panel. But for now that’s another challenge; since we don’t have a council, we can not bring them before any panel for a disciplinary action.  But that does not mean they will go scot free. We will have a compilation of those that breach the code and when we eventually have a council, they will come and answer their queries. Definitely, they won’t go scot-free. They will be sanctioned at the appropriate time. That is why we are insisting that before any material can be exposed, they should ask for APCON clearance certificate, the ASP certificate. If you have that it means it has gone through the processes of vetting and approval.

Over-regulation still remains an issue in the industry. For instance, a telecoms brand would have to deal with NCC, take its communication materials to APCON, and also sometimes, interface with CPC and other related consumer regulatory agencies. How do we tackle this?

It’s about separation of powers. For instance, NCC does not vet your communication materials. They only license you to operate. They are even also on our vetting panel. So they don’t vet as a body, except when you go against their codes, that’s when they come after you, the same thing with NBC and APCON. I know that for anything you are offering the public, APCON certifies and we even go there to inspect, to ensure that those things you are promising the public are actually real.  Then we give you approval to go ahead with your promo. The fact remains that I’ve not really seen anybody accusing us of over-regulating them. The only area we are having such issue is NAFDAC, because advertisements relating to pharmaceutical products, cosmetics and drugs are on their list as well to regulate. But, we’ve been trying over the years to make sure all these are streamlined, but we’ve not really succeeded in that regard. But we are hoping and praying that government will look into it and probably see how to review all the laws.

What is the relationship between APCON and other consumer regulatory agencies?

We have representatives of almost all these agencies on Advertising Standards Panel (ASP) and that’s the only panel that can approve materials. But they too have their own laws as well.

There is the accusation that the agency always looks the other way when it comes to enforcing the law on political advertisements?

You know I told you earlier that the major challenge we have is identifying those behind these campaigns. For instance, a lot of APC materials have been forwarded, a lot of PDP materials have also been forwarded, same with many other political parties’ materials. There are so many of them that have been forwarded. Our area of challenge remains those materials coming from the support groups. The big parties have been complying, because INEC told them that, NBC told them that, and APCON is saying so.