The Federal Consumer Competition and Protection Commission (FCCPC) has launched an advocacy campaign to educate traders, market associations, and supermarket operators on the illegality of price fixing. According to Adamu Abdullahi, the Acting Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive of the FCCPC, the commission will begin sanctioning open markets, cartels, and supermarkets found engaging in price fixing practices.
In a one-day sensitization workshop organized by the commission for students in Nigerian tertiary institutions, Abdullahi said, “We have embarked on advocacy visits to open markets across the country and supermarkets to educate the operators and traders on what the consumer protection law stipulates.”
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Price fixing is an illegal practice where competing businesses agree on setting the price of products or services instead of allowing market forces to determine prices naturally through competition. This collusion can take various forms and is designed to achieve mutual benefits for the companies involved at the expense of consumers and the competitive market environment.
In Nigeria, where the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the rate of change in prices of goods and commodities, remained elevated at 33.69 percent in April, price fixing could further undermine the principles of free competition and fair market practices, leading to higher prices, reduced innovation, and overall market inefficiencies.
“For instance, you can’t go to the market and see a particular price tag on an item and when you go to pick it, they will tell you the price is higher, it is misleading and deceptive and the law does not allow that,” Abdullahi explained.
He added, “Also, those traders in the open markets form associations on different food items like yam, egg, rice and others and sit down to fix prices of such items. They become a cartel of price fixing and we at FCCPC are going there to tell them the law is against that.”
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Due to its harmful effects on consumers and the economy, price fixing is strictly regulated and heavily penalized under antitrust laws in Nigeria and globally. However, Abdullahi emphasized the need for sensitization, stating, “What we are doing now is sensitization, and after that sanction will follow for those defaulting.”
Furthermore, the FCCPC boss disclosed that a committee had been set up and given three months to develop a curriculum to be rolled out in schools to start teaching Nigerian students more about consumer rights as part of the commission’s mandate.
