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Counterfeit products irk commission on fair trade
2007-08-20 08:53:19
By Musita John
Counterfeit goods will remain a feature of the market until such time that the legal framework stops hampering the operations of the Fair Competition Commission, a senior official with the agency has said.
John Mponela, head of the commission`s department charged with combating the spread of fake items, said in an interview with The Guardian yesterday that the law now in use contains provisions which bar them from operating as effectively as circumstances demand.
`The Fair Competition Act that became operational in 2004 inhibits the commission from fulfilling its obligations as expected. It fact, it does not even give legitimacy to FCC to conduct any inspections without a court warrant,` he observed.
`We are not allowed to make checks in shops or warehouses unless we have a court warrant saying that we could do so.
This is most unfortunate,` he added, noting that they had expected to have the law appropriately amended at the just-ended National Assembly sessions, `but we hope that will be done at the coming House meeting next October`.
Asked that FCC be armed with legal teeth that bite hard, Mponela said flaws in the respective law pose a daunting challenge to his commission because crafty businesspersons have been using the obvious deficiencies to import fake, shoddy or expired goods with relative impunity.
Mponela said the government has been losing a fortune through business in fake, shoddy or expired goods in which most dealers have been reluctant to tell the truth about the origin of the imports.
`Fighting the spread of counterfeit goods has been a very challenging task because some businesspersons import goods bearing fictitious marks. We have mostly depended on good Samaritans to tip us off as a way of helping us nip cases of deception in the bud, before identifying and nabbing culprits,` he observed.
He added: `If you are not careful you can end giving business persons fame because some of them go abroad and order goods of which they think can not easily be identified and when they come here they pay little money because the entire production is also very cheap as it is done in black markets.`
The FCC official said they currently have a consignment of fake imports that will be destroyed `after we are through with our own logistics`, commenting further: `We shall keep the public duly posted on the matter because the media will participate fully in the entire destruction exercise.`
Mponela said Tanzania was slightly luckier than the other East African countries over the problem of fake goods flooding the market, revealing: `Countries like the US and the UK has gone a step forward in containing the problem and have been assisting us in dealing with the problem in our own country.`
On May 5, 2007 FCC destroyed a total of 3,085 fake China-made fluorescent light tubes with a Philips trade mark.
The consignment, impounded in February 2007, was imported by a Dar es Salaam-based company.
The consignment, estimated to be worth 26m/-, was impounded thanks to networking between Tanzania Revenue Authority and FCC authorities.
FCC’s customer service and administration director Michael Shilla said the consignment was found to have counterfeit goods after the commission contacted the Philips agent in Dar es Salaam for official word and expert advice.
The goods were destroyed at the Pugu Kinyamwezi damp, a few kilometers west of Dar es Salaam, under tight police security.
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