Olumide Awoyemi is the group executive, Development and Partnership of Rouleaux Foundation. In this interview with Amaka Anagor-Ewuzie, he shares some of his initiatives and how he hopes through business development partnership to empower Nigerians to build food safety capacity within the ecosystem. Excerpt:
Tell us about your partnership with the Lagos State Ministry of Commerce on food safety?
We have a proposal with which we intend to revolutionise the informal food business landscape in Lagos. Our Safe and Healthy Market Initiative (SAHMI) is aimed at empowering all stakeholders within the ecosystem by helping them build food safety capacity through continuous training, medical fitness surveillance, market infrastructure upgrade and maintenance, periodic pest and rodent control.
Through SAHMI, we intend to align food safety practice in Lagos with World Health Organisation’s (WHO) shared responsibility concept of food safety, and World Bank’s safe food imperative. If well implemented, it would help standardise the operation of street food vendors, greengrocers (pepper sellers), meat packers and abattoir operators.
While SAHMI is applicable in every part of Nigeria, we have chosen Lagos State as a point of reference because it is the most important food market in Nigeria and Africa by extension. Thousands of cattle heads are slaughtered and processed mostly in unhygienic conditions in Lagos daily, tons of fruit and vegetables are consumed and a vast majority of residents eat food prepared by roadside food vendors who oftentimes are not safety conscious, even when their medical fitness is doubtful.
We choose to partner with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry through the office of the director of Agric-business because the ministry has supervisory authority over food markets in Lagos State. Our expectation is that the ministry will help us align another relevant ministry, departments, agencies of government and relevant trade associations in the informal food business ecosystem.
The paradigm shift that we desire in the ecosystem cannot come without the goodwill and support of relevant stakeholders. We need food handlers to imbibe a new mindset and a professional way of doing things. We also need government to pay deliberate attention to the state’s enormous food safety burden by creating a co-regulatory compliance system for food safety.
We already have the approval and endorsement of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Cooperative to proceed with the first phase of the initiative, which involves a rollout of food safety training for select food handlers across Lagos.
We have retained the service of a certified food safety consultant and mobilised volunteers. We will train these volunteers as trainers in English with the recently launched Federal Government Manual on food safety. These trained volunteers would in turn deliver standardised food safety training in indigenous language to food handlers. The training will help to increase the level of food safety awareness and consciousness of food handlers.
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It is our hope that the four pillars of SAHMI will be mainstreamed by the government to regulate the informal food business ecosystem, in a sustainable and affordable manner. Food handlers should be able to prove that they have undergone the necessary training, have sound medical fitness, stay in an environment that is not a haven for pests and rodents and that the immediate infrastructure that serves their business is in good repair at all times.
Co-regulatory systems have been shown in literature to offer more value to governance and policy administration than authoritarian regulatory systems. In co-regulatory compliance systems, facilitation of compliance and not punishment becomes very important.
It is not anchored on the adversarial relationship between the regulated and regulator. Instead, it emphasises the extent the regulator goes to help the regulated comply with new rules. This is why aligning the leadership and membership of relevant trade associations in the informal food business ecosystem is crucial for the success of SAHMI.
What do you intend to achieve with this project?
SAHMI is our flagship public health intervention in Lagos State. We believe that health and wellness start from nutrition, and this source of nutrition should not be such that predispose people to diseases that compromise health, drain scarce resources and hamper the productivity of individuals and communities.
Even though the food safety challenges that bedevil our society are quite enormous, we are convinced at Rouleaux Foundation that they are not insurmountable. We are ready to work with all stakeholders to use the solutions we are proposing to address the food safety burden in Lagos.
We are in active consultation with senior officials at the Lagos Ministry of Commerce Industry and Cooperative. We are also scheduled to make representation to the secretariat of key trade associations such as market women association, butchers and meatpackers association to align them with our proposal.
To finance SAHMI, we intend to make grant request to local and international bodies as well as corporate organisations in the FMCG sub-sector of Nigeria. The grants shall be used judiciously to facilitate food safety training and certifications, medical examination and surveillance of food handlers, infrastructure upgrade and maintenance, as well as routine pest and rodent control.
Also, we shall be engaging with media practitioners across the spectrum of print, broadcast and social media to align them with SAHMI. We are already in the process of mobilising an army of volunteers that will help facilitate training for food handlers.
What is your take on adherence to food safety in Lagos and Nigeria generally?
Most participants in the informal food business ecosystem in Nigeria cannot be described as safety conscious. Independent, self-employed, greengrocers (pepper and fruit sellers), street food vendors, meat packers, go about their business with scant regard for food safety.
Apart from limited safety consciousness of individual food handlers, the safety of the environment where food business is carried out is another factor that contributes to our high food safety burden.
A lot of foodstuff markets lack sanitary and pipe-borne water infrastructure, and many are surrounded by clogged drainages, if they are not invested by dangerous pests and rodents. The health status of these food handlers most times cannot be ascertained. These and many more are the food safety issues that require urgent policy attention from government.
Others are unprofessional conduct exemplified by lousy food handling practices, uncertainty about the medical fitness of food handlers, decrepit infrastructure, hygiene and cleanliness of food handling premises are the issues that must be jointly addressed by all stakeholders. This is because unsafe food handling practices as the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrate can be a threat to individuals and the society.
Reported food safety incidents show that lives are being lost, people lose productive time when they are bedridden due to food borne disease, and there can be substantial productivity loss to an economy when food borne disease outbreaks occur.
What are the likely diseases that can be contracted through wrong handling of foods?
Food contaminated with micro-organisms like shigella, eschericia coli, campylobacter, salmonella, staphyllococus aureaus have been implicated in food borne disease outbreaks in Nigeria. These disease causing organisms have been isolated in beef, fish, soup, snail, rice, beans, water-melon, plantain, meat-pie, egg-roll, fufu, moi-moi, doughnut, ukwa etc.
They have caused diseases like diarrhea, abdominal pain, renal failure, hemolytic anaemia, hemorrhagic colitis among others. Other zoonotic diseases include brucellosis, bovine tuberculosis, bird-flu, anthrax, campylobacter infection, cryptosporidiosis, cysticerosis, dengue fever, ebola, listeria infection, lyme disease, ringworm, and streptococcal sepsis among others.
What different strategies need to be adopted to make food safe in public places?
The entire informal food business ecosystem requires urgent policy attention. Food handlers across several food business segments should be made to undergo mandatory food safety training, so that they can start imbibing safety culture.
There should also be a mechanism in place to ascertain the health status of food handlers. Use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and related professional requirement must become the norm across food markets. Government should make sure that food markets have enabling infrastructures like sanitary rooms, pipe-born water, regular pest and rodent control, and drainages.
Because ignorance and nonchalance contribute in no small ways to food safety burden, there must be aggressive attempt to sensitise and create awareness targeted at food handlers. Such awareness campaigns should be augmented by mandatory standardised food training and certification for food handlers. There should also be a mechanism in place to validate the medical fitness of food handlers in the informal food business ecosystem by subjecting them to regular tests.
There is little proof that these independent entrepreneurs adhere to respectable standards in the course of doing their business. Even if some of them may be habitually safety conscious as a matter of personal taste, there is no way to proof this through standard documentation.
As a matter of public health security, they must also be brought under the co- regulatory compliance system that we are proposing such that society can have a certain level of proof that they know what they are doing when it comes to food safety.
What is your advice for Nigerians on food safety?
Food safety is as a result of the action and inaction of multiple stakeholders. It is the shared responsibility of everyone in society. It cannot be neglected for government alone to handle, and neither can we afford to make it the sole responsibility of economically self-interested actor in the informal food business ecosystem. If we want our food to deliver the nutrition and energy, we need to lead a productive life and we have to treat food safety issues with the urgency they deserve.
