A former Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, recently drew the nation’s attention to the fact that Nigerians consume more than twenty billion sticks of cigarettes every year. He also disclosed that forty-five million adults in the country currently use tobacco products.

Worse still, according the health expert, eighty-two per cent of the population is exposed to second-hand smoking. In other words, such a huge segment of the population is involuntarily subjected to the effects of smoking, owing to being exposed to smoke when visiting bars, night clubs, restaurants etcetera.

It would be recalled the Federal Government had announced that Nigeria was on its way to ratifying the protocol to eliminate illicit trade in tobacco products. Already, the memorandum on the protocol has been approved. According to reports, Ministry of Health and the Federal Ministry of Finance are therefore collaborating to establish an automated system for tracking and tracing tobacco products with the aim of preventing revenue leakages and curtailing illicit trade in tobacco products.

However, it may be observed that government seems ambivalence, conflicted as it is, on whether to emphasize the health risks or the pursuance of revenue. This has been the fundamental dilemma of mankind over cigarettes.

Health authorities would readily tick off ten types of killer diseases that directly result from cigarette-smoking; and then look the other way, hooked, as the government tends to be, on the enormous revenue accruing from the tobacco industry and its rich lobby.

Notably, no sane society can minimize the consequences of its citizens smoking twenty billion sticks of cigarettes a year. It signals that the country has a tobacco problem. It also means that, in effect, the per capita consumption is about twelve thousand sticks of cigarettes. It is tempting to underrate the forty-five million regular active smokers as being a small number, under 33 per cent. It is easy to forget the fate of the passive smokers who are equally at risk and whose health conditions are, indeed, exacerbated if they had issues from asthma through Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) to cataracts and diabetes.

Smokers have tended to persist in their habits and although the number of smokers is reducing, its reduction is in trickles. It is one of the tobacco imponderables that in spite of the known risks, people continue to feed such a risky and dangerous habit.

Efforts to discourage the habit include the ban on smoking in public places. But that health-saving regulation seems to be observed more in the breach. There is no evidence that our law enforcement officials even attempt to enforce the rule. The population equally seems not to care whether it is enforced or not.

In spite of the ban of cigarette advertising on television and colour magazines, which was done to reduce the injurious messages and images, young people continue to glamorize smoking, a habit that truly endangers life. In addition to the diseases, bad breath and burnt lips, the malodorous stench emitted by smokers is often so disgusting as to be truly objectionable.

Parents should therefore begin early to warn their children not to contract the habit. Teachers should be vigilant and watch out for children who smoke in schools. Above all, the government should regularly embark on public enlightenment to remind people of the dangers of smoking.

It should also enforce the law against smoking in public places and emphasize the grave dangers of passive smoking which seems not to be well understood by most Nigerians.

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