Jacquelyn Hamer
Last week I dealt briefly with the Consumer Protection Act, the fact that it is yet to secure presidential assent despite its passage in the National Assembly some years ago and – as a consequence of the absence of any meaningful mechanisms to safeguard consumer rights – we are stuck with a regime of vendor/customer relations that is not only replete with injustices but in which there is little if any recourse for aggrieved customers.
Issues like exchange of damaged goods and honouring of warranties, which issues I alluded to in my last article, are among the most common areas of poor customer service and – at least in my view – the problem is growing worse. If, as appears to be the case, we are more-or-less powerless to persuade the large numbers of service providers who are disinclined to provide good customer service, we ought at least to equip ourselves with mechanisms that provide some measure of recourse for service seekers. The real problem is that in many respects service providers are really under no pressure to give good service.
As best as I can tell the Ministry responsible for the enforcement of consumer rights has no really strong legal instrument at its disposal with which to enforce its mandate. My understanding is that their strongest weapon is moral suasion which, as I have already pointed out, is often no weapon at all……….though the Ministry insists that there are cases in which moral suasion actually works. That may well be true though I rather suspect that many aggrieved consumers are so lacking in confidence in the meager mechanism of moral suasion that they simply never bother to resort to it. It is the sense of helplessness which the consumer experiences in the face of having been wronged that I find particularly galling.
If it is comforting to know that there are service providers in our midst to whose consciences we can appeal with positive result, the fact that this is the best mechanism available for the enforcement of consumer rights provides cold comfort in a commercial culture such as ours. For reasons which are hardly a secret Guyanese consumers continue to be vulnerable to cheap, sub-standard goods which, were the Consumer Protection Act to be brought into force, would place considerable pressure on service providers, particularly those who deal in the sale of everyday consumer goods to abide by the regulations governing issues like exchange of goods and honouring of warranties.
One of my particular concerns in this regard has to do with the weaknesses of the two institutions that are principally responsible for monitoring standards of safety and quality as far as imported goods are concerned. I speak here about the Guyana National Bureau of Standards and the Department of Food and Drugs.
Even before we begin to deal with goods imported through our legitimate ports of entry there is the issue of illegal imports through our porous borders. The smuggling of goods across the Corentyne River from Suriname has long been a routine practice. Time was when most of the smuggled items were relatively portable consumer goods. That is no longer the case. People are importing much larger household appliances under illegal arrangements which neither the Customs Department nor the monitoring agencies have any real control over. I have not checked recently but I am aware that a point had been reached where illegal importation from Suriname had become such a major problem that some of the legitimate stores in Berbice were catching hell – so to speak – as far as sales were concerned. The imported items, fridges, television sets, micro waves and sundry other household appliances, were being brought into Guyana free of duty and sold at prices well below those which applied in the cases of duty-paid items purchased locally, Of course, there was a huge down side to this. I am aware, for example, of quite a few cases in which persons acquired illegally imported household appliances – a fridge in one instance and a television in another – and had no recourse whatsoever when it was discovered after a relatively short period that the items were defective.
Our failure to protect our borders from illegal imports – of consumer goods and sometimes far more damaging items – is in part a function of a lack of resources with which to do so. It is, also, a function of the ineffectiveness of those institutions set up to perform those functions. Stricter policing of our border with Suriname has not done a great deal to staunch the flow of illegal imports.
Our border with Brazil presents an even more challenging situation. It is larger, more remote, less populated and far more vulnerable. People travel to and from Brazil every day with no legal controls whatsoever and while the opening of the Takatu Bridge offers new and positive opportunities for legitimate trade between the two countries, you can be sure that it also offers opportunities for the illegal movement of goods into Guyana. Somehow, I have a feeling that while a road link between Guyana and Brazil will create new an exciting opportunities for Guyana’s business sector it will also pose some of the most formidable security challenges ever to confront our country.
I turn now to goods imported through our legitimate ports. Apart from the role of the Customs and Trade Administration in the monitoring and the application of the relevant duties and taxes, the GNBS and the Food and Drugs Department also have critical roles to perform as far as monitoring for standards and quality is concerned. The problem is that the Customs is by far the largest and best-organized of the three departments. The other two are relatively small. Lest I be misunderstood let me say at the outset that I am not implying that these two departments are not doing as good a job as they can. I firmly believe, however, that given the continual increase in the volume of imports into Guyana over the years these two departments have simply not grown commensurate with the magnitude and importance of their functions. As such, they currently possess nowhere near the capacity to do their jobs effectively. Evidence of this is to be found in the volume of sub-standard goods – including electrical goods that are both defective and dangerous and expired drugs – in the country.
The Food and Drugs Department, particularly, patently lacks the capacity to effectively monitor food and drug imports to ensure issues like shelf life and the authenticity of the products being imported. Much of what they do depends heavily on the cooperation of the Customs Department and the importers themselves and I have heard complaints that Customs is not always inclined to look out for the interests of the Food and Drugs Department.
In one were to judge from the frequency with which particular establishments are raided and goods seized one might even be inclined to think that there are cases in which expired or at least nearly expired goods are imported into Guyana deliberately and routinely. Some time ago I read an article in this very newspaper cautioning parents to be on the lookout for expired snack foods which were apparently imported into the country in huge quantities in the period prior to the start of the last school year and had expired but were still being put on the market. I have seen reports too of vendors who are able to acquire and dispose of sufficiently large quantities of near expired snack food and beverages to make a reasonable living out of that particular business.
I share the view of those who might be inclined to argue that the focus of this particular article has been on consumer protection as against what we loosely describe as customer service. The latter is usually construed as a form or pattern of behavior that informs the relationship between service provider and service seeker while the former is more commonly interpreted as a set of laws or regulations that protect consumers. The truth is that there is an inextricable link between the two insofar as they both have bearing on customer satisfaction. I believe that it is important to make this point if only to state that Customer Service, is not wholly and solely, a curriculum that can be taught to service providers by way of a set of rules of thumb for dealing with service seekers. People are unlikely, in most instances, for example, to be satisfied with the quality of service that they receive in situations where they are constantly vulnerable to being sold cheap, sub-standard goods which continue to flood the market because there are no reliable mechanisms designed to keep those sub-standard goods out.
Good customer service has to be seen as an enabling environment which, as far as possible, offers service seekers a comprehensive protection from being denied access to the quality of the service that they seek and which they invariably pay for. It is a thought that those responsible for creating the regulatory framework that shapes that environment may wish to ponder as the season of heightened commercialism approaches.
Finally, I ponder the role of the various private sector bodies in safeguarding consumer rights. I admit to a lack of knowledge of whether or not this is one of their legitimate functions though I submit that any private sector body worth its salt ought to be setting its face against things like the importation and sale of expired goods and a commercial culture that refuses to honour warranties and the right of customers to seek recourse in the return and/or exchange of items which really ought not to have been offered for sale in the first place. For me, this is not just a matter of consumer rights. It is a matter of basic human decency.
