If you laugh easily, you will probably find the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s description of tobacco to be a tragicomedy funny but serious at the same time.
“Tobacco is the only lega l drug that kills many of its users when used exactly as intended by manufacturers,” WHO said in its global report on trends in tobacco smoking 2000-2025 – First edition.
Up-to-date data on Nigeria’s tobacco situation is often hard to come by, but United-States-based anti-smoking campaigner Tobacco Atlas estimated in 2016 that more than 16,100 Nigerians were killed annually by smoking-related disease.
The statistics included, among others, 246 men every week.
Despite this, more than 25,000 children (10-14 years old) and 7,488,000 adults (15+ years old) continue to use tobacco each day.
This comes despite Nigeria being a signatory to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) since 2005, and despite the country’s adoption of the National Tobacco Control (NTC) Act in 2015. Nigeria suffers over 17,000 annual deaths as a result of smoking-related disease.
A 2019 study by BMC Public Health titled ‘Current prevalence pattern of tobacco smoking in Nigeria: a systematic review and meta-analysis’ assessed the prevalence and number of smokers in Nigeria between 1995 and 2015.
It found that the estimated median age at initiation of smoking was 16.8 years. It estimated an increase in the number of current smokers from 8 to 11 million (or a decline from 13 to 10.6 per cent of the population). The pooled mean cigarettes consumption per person per day was 10.1 (6.1–14.2), accounting for 110 million cigarettes per day and over 40 billion cigarettes consumed in Nigeria in 2015.
A National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said of Nigeria’s six geopolitical regions, smoking prevalence is highest in the North-Central region—comprising the states of Kogi, Niger, Benue, Kwara, Plateau, Nasarawa and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
The Southsouth, which covers the states of Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Bayelsa, Rivers, Delta and Edo, comes second.