The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) Nigeria has advocated high taxes on tobacco companies to help in reducing its usage by the public.
A senior programme officer of the organization, Solomon Adoga, made the call during a stakeholders’ engagement for Civil Society Organisations on tobacco control in Gombe State convened by CISLAC.
He said if high taxes are placed by the government on tobacco companies, production would reduce and prices would be higher, thereby affecting drastically the affordability and smoking by the public.
According to him, although smoking cigarettes is socially acceptable in the society, it poses serious threat to public health, adding that with high taxes, many people will not be able to purchase and use the products.
“Some of the strategies to control tobacco use include; monitoring tobacco use prevention policies, protecting people from tobacco smoking, offering help to quit tobacco use, warning about the dangers of tobacco, enforcing bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship and raising taxes on tobacco.
“We are here to have an engagement with civil society in Gombe on tobacco taxation and tobacco control basically. So this is the project that we will be implementing for sometime. We are happy to be in Gombe to galvanise civil society to contribute their quota to the tobacco tax advocacy in Nigeria.
“The essence of tobacco taxation as you know, tobacco is a very harmful product to health, not only to the health of the individual who uses the product but to public health generally because there are consequences on second hand and third hand use of tobacco.
“So tobacco tax is a component of tobacco control. What that component basically entails is increasing prices through increased taxation to ensure that the burden of tobacco taxation is moved to the final consumer thereby reducing ultimately affordability of the product,” he said.
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