Zika Bobby
Distillers and Blenders Association of Nigeria (DIBAN), under the auspices of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), has stepped up its advocacy campaigns to promote responsible consumption of alcoholic beverages while discouraging its sale to users below the age of 18.
In a statement by its Chairman, Patrick Anegbe, the association said it had taken up the advocacy as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) through outdoors messaging on billboards, mass transit buses and radio campaigns to sensitise consumers about the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption and advocating moderation. Some of the campaign themes include:
“Drink moderately, Health is wealth, Enjoy life to the fullest and Don’t mix.”
Anegbe said: “As part of DIBAN’s CSR initiatives, we will also embark on various advocacy campaigns, which will include training of our distributors and retailers on the need to avoid sales of alcoholic beverages to underage. This will require the development of appropriate training manual, which will be in major Nigerian languages. To restrict access of the underage to alcohol beverages, the industry will strengthen the supervision of distributors and retailers.
“In addition, we will employ advocacy campaign programmes to strengthen the efforts towards reducing alcohol consumption, underage drinking and improving responsible drinking in collaboration with civil society groups, under the supervision of National Agency for Food Drug Administration Control, Consumer Protection Agency and Federal Ministry of Health.
“On our future plans, we anticipate the third phase of our campaign to commence in March 2020. This phase will engage the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) in working out the modality for the enforcement of compulsory possession of the National Identity card, which includes information on age as basis for age verification before sale of alcoholic beverages. The industry will continue its drive to help regulatory agencies identify the unregulated producers whose products are essentially substandard and can be dangerous to human health.
“DIBAN will in addition deploy robust social media platforms to reach out to the target audience while one of our member companies is working on the roll out of the highly impactful, school enlightenment programme-SMASHED.”