No-Smoking Signs Spread Slowly Across Africa

By MARC LACEY KAMPALA, Uganda, Jan. 30— President Yoweri Museveni said recently that his prayers would be answered if a thousand major cigarette companies operated in Uganda instead of just one. That one, British American Tobacco, provides about one-sixteenth of Uganda's total tax revenue and provides work, either directly or indirectly, for more than half a million people in a country in need of every job it can get. The company's philanthropy benefits AIDS orphans and war victims. But Phillip Karugaba, a Ugandan lawyer and leading antismoking activist, has a different view of the company, an integral part of the economy of East Africa since the days of British colonialism. ''If we had 1,000 B.A.T.'s we wouldn't have any population left,'' said Mr. Karugaba, who is trying to help Africa catch up with the antismoking movements raging elsewhere. ''B.A.T. is so powerful and has so much money that it is not considered an evil monster here. Not yet.'' British American Tobacco, which is based in London and has subsidiaries throughout Africa and the world, earned $1.5 billion on revenue of more than $18 billion in its last fiscal year, and boasted recently that its Africa divisions had never lost a lawsuit filed by the antismoking lobby. (Brown & Williamson of the United States, which the company owns, has been the division most besieged by lawsuits.) Lately, however, African judges and lawmakers have left the company on the defensive here, an area that has long been a smoker's paradise. Smoking is still allowed on many domestic airlines in Africa. Smoke clouds the air in most restaurants and bars and buildings. Some hospitals here even allow patients to puff on a cigarette as they mend. Generally, the more destitute a country the less likely that smoking is controlled. South Africa, with sub-Saharan Africa's strongest economy, leads the way when it comes to tobacco regulation. Uganda, which still relies heavily on foreign economic assistance, is far behind. ''Relative lack of tobacco legislation in many African countries continues to make African countries a target of multinational tobacco companies,'' a group of African health ministers said last fall in preparation for talks next month at the World Health Organization on strict global tobacco regulations. British American Tobacco, the world's second-largest tobacco company after Philip Morris, and the numerous other tobacco companies that operate around the continent have fought to keep Africa a smoking zone. Slowly, however, no-smoking signs are gaining in popularity. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania are enacting laws to restrict smoking in public places. In Uganda, a High Court judge, at Mr. Karugaba's urging, recently ordered the country's National Environmental Management Authority to enforce such restrictions within a year. British American Tobacco executives asked if the company could take part in the first planning meeting, but the government said no. Antismoking advocates here say their goal is to regulate tobacco, not outlaw it. They are receiving backing from an array of groups in the United States like the San Francisco Tobacco Free Coalition that have been taking on the tobacco industry for years. In Uganda, the activists are currently sparring with British American Tobacco over the warning labels on cigarette packs. Mr. Karugaba is seeking a court order that would strengthen the severity of the warnings, which now read, in capital letters: ''Ministry of Health warning: Cigarette smoking can be harmful to your health.'' When that warning label was under consideration by the Ugandan government in the late 1980's, British American Tobacco told policy makers that it did not believe cigarette smoking was harmful. ''We think it would only be fair to have a form of words which is not excessively strong,'' the company wrote in 1988 to the Ugandan government, which was just the sixth African country at the time, along with Libya, Kenya, Senegal, Sudan and Mauritius, to put labels on cigarettes. Since then, the company has acknowledged the health effects of smoking, albeit in a carefully worded way. Mr. Karugaba wants explicit warnings on packs that identify the diseases that can afflict smokers. He holds up as a guide the warnings in Canada, which show gruesome photographs of suffering smokers. In another telling sign that the antismoking movement in Africa has advanced, lawsuits filed by individual smokers are no longer anomalies. While British American Tobacco successfully challenged separate lawsuits filed by two smokers in Uganda in 2000, a Nairobi lawyer recently filed a suit that is still in its early stages against the company's Kenyan subsidiary, accusing it of selling products that caused his client, an elderly farmer who suffers from vascular disease, to lose a leg. Henry Rugamba, a spokesman for British American Tobacco's Uganda subsidiary, acknowledged that the company had been forced to deal with ''a couple of lawyers who have made tobacco their issue.'' Nonetheless, he said, ''I don't feel under siege. I think it is healthy -- if I can use the word -- to raise the issues.'' Worried about its image, the company has begun a public relations campaign. It recently hired Wafula Oguttu, an antismoking activist who is the editor of the Monitor, Uganda's independent newspaper, to lead community discussions on smoking. In addition, British American Tobacco has voluntarily withdrawn much of its advertising, although it still blankets Kampala's bars and nightclubs with promotions for its Sportsman and Benson & Hedges brands. Most of all, though, the tobacco industry is relying on its many friends in government. Uganda's finance minister, Gerald Ssendaula, is a tobacco trader himself. He recently interceded in a tax dispute on behalf of a small rival to British American Tobacco that makes products distributed by his family. Meanwhile, the minister of tourism, trade and industry, Moses Ali, has invited Ugandans to smoke as a form of patriotism. ''Nobody is forced to smoke but if you do then we welcome you because we shall get taxes from you,'' he told reporters recently. The biggest cheerleader of all for British American Tobacco, however, has been Mr. Museveni, who has described the company as a ...

Ghana to Host second WHO meeting on Tobacco

Ghana has been selected to host the second working group meeting on World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in April this year. The meeting is to, among other things, identify and develop opportunities for practical cooperation with competent intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations in the promotion of sustainable alternatives to tobacco growing. It is also to help achieve the FCTC's objective of protecting present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and economic consequences of tobacco consumption and exposure to smoking, as well as the reduction of demand for tobacco products. At the inauguration of a nine-member Local Planning Committee to plan for the meeting scheduled for April 20 to 23, outgoing Deputy Minister of Health, Dr Oakley Quaye-Kuma, said the WHO convention on tobacco control was the first treaty negotiated under the auspices of WHO, which is an evidence-based treaty that reaffirmed the right of all people to the highest standards of health. The objectives of the working group meeting is among other things to interact with other global players and to deliberate and strategise on alternative livelihoods to tobacco growing in order to protect the environment and the health of persons in the production and manufacturing of tobacco products. About 40 participants from 18 member countries would be attending the meeting. The FCTC treaty adopted in 2003 by the World Health Assembly, is the world's first treaty devoted to health to get people to quit smoking and to reduce the estimated five million deaths annually caused by smoking. He said tobacco smoking was unhealthy and caused chronic diseases that could lead to death, adding that smoke damaged the lungs and was the principal cause of lung or bronchial cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. "What many people, smokers and non-smokers alike, may not know is that tobacco use increases risks of cancer of many sites in the body in addition to the lungs. "These include the head and neck (covering cancers of the oesophagus, larynx, tongue, salivary glands, lip, mouth and pharynx) urinary bladder and kidneys, uterine cervix, breast, pancreas and colon," he said. The Deputy Minister said people who cultivated and handled tobacco leaves were equally at risk of tobacco related diseases, such as green tobacco sickness, pesticide intoxication, respiration and dermatological disorders and other types of cancers. To this end, the FCTC called on all parties to the Convention to raise awareness about the addictive and harmful nature of tobacco products and about industry interference with tobacco control policies, as well as avoid conflict of interest from government officials and employees. According to the Deputy Minister, Article 17 and 18 of the Framework Convention deals with provision of support for economically viable alternative activities and protection of the environment and the health of persons. Parties to the Convention were, therefore, required to promote economically viable alternatives for tobacco workers, growers and, as the case may be, individual sellers, he said. In order to make progress in the promotion of sustainable alternatives to tobacco growing at the district, regional, national and international levels, Mr. Quaye-kuma said, there was the need to increase the participation of specialized local and international agencies which are recognized experts in this process. The Chairman of the local Planning Committee, Dr Akwasi Osei, Chief Psychiatrist at the Ministry of Health, said issues to be discussed at the meeting would be adopted by the General Assembly towards the end of the year as a guide for the world towards the control of tobacco production, marketing and consumption. He said Ghana was in the good books of WHO, hence the choice for the second meeting and pledged the committee's readiness to ensure a memorable and very productive meeting. Source: GNA