Last week, parts of the popular Balogun Market in Lagos burnt down and traders reportedly lost goods worth millions of naira. The last time I wrote about a market fire was in 2011, just before the general elections that year. A section of my local market in Apapa had burnt down and although the reported loss was not in the millions, the traders there felt the same kind of loss — they had lost everything and had to start all over again. Luckily, it was election year, just a few weeks before the elections and candidates looking for votes, so Mrs Oluremi Tinubu, came to their rescue. This time again, it is a few weeks to the elections and affected parties are calling on the government to come to their aid in rebuilding their business and I am sure that government will heed their call. I have said before that I do not believe that it is the responsibility of government to help rebuild a business after it has been affected by a fire. Definitely, government should provide good infrastructure — good power lines, enforcement of planning regulations, good and efficient fire service — to reduce the risk of fire and in the event of a fire, reduce the impact of and losses of lives and property caused by the fire.
My opinion in 2011 was that insurance companies have not done enough to sensitise these sectors to the need for insurance. You could argue that the potential market share is not worth the trouble or that there are religious and cultural considerations impeding insurance penetration in the informal sectors, but with all the song and dance about growing small businesses this is an area that would benefit from some kind of regulation. Take for instance the concept of free care in the US health care service delivery. A percentage of the total business of private healthcare institutions must be free care, that is, care provided to people who cannot afford to pay for those services. Yes, health care is an essential service, life and death matter, but for some, recovering from the loss of merchandise in a market fire can be a matter of life and death. Insurance regulation to promote small businesses could provide that a percentage of the business of insurance companies must be from the informal sectors. It is a win-win situation: market traders and others in the informal sectors are used to being levied for one thing or the other, paying insurance premiums shouldn’t be such a stretch (after all cultural and religious considerations have been dealt with). For the insurance companies, they get a more diverse portfolio and are not relying only on oil and gas or government business.
Unless you carry on business in certain sectors, insurance coverage is not something that a lot of us concern ourselves with unless we are told to do so by regulation. I met an elderly man once who said that insurance professionals had a place in hell because they take your money, giving you false hope that they will be there for you in the event that an insured risk occurs, and when it does and you make a claim, they give you a hundred reasons why you are not entitled to your expected payout. That is how strongly he felt about the business of insurance.
But the idea of insurance should not leave such a bad taste in anyone’s mouth. In Nigeria, the insurance sector: operating practices, etc., is governed by the Insurance Act. It is a very long and detailed piece of legislation to regulate the business of insurance in Nigeria, and tries to address the issues that stand on the head of insurance like devil horns. For instance, just as required in the banking sector, insurance companies have a minimum required paid-up share capital. The Act goes as far as regulating who can be appointed as directors and top managers in insurance companies. This is a business of trust, one in which you pay upfront for protection from an occurrence which may never happen. But, God forbid, something happens, it would be good to know that you have not been sinking your money into a fraudulent company that has mismanaged premiums paid by policy holders and cannot live up to their end of the bargain.
Who wants to tempt fate? The day you decide not to renew your insurance policy, is the day that someone with sticky fingers will dispossess you of your property, or a mysterious fire will consume what you have spent millions acquiring.
A few hours after the Balogun Market fire, another fire razed the Oko Baba Sawmill in the Ebute Meta area of Lagos State. In that fire, a pensioner lost his life because he reportedly tried to retrieve his pension documents from his home. This is very sad. This man risked and lost his life because we live in a system where pensioners are degraded and humiliated before they can get paid their pensions. This is where government needs to help. In this day and age of computers and digital technology, it is sad that pensioners are called on every other day for one verification or the other, and all this for sums of money that cannot sustain them for a week. With little social services for the poor and elderly, the least we can do is at least come up with a more dignifying process for pensioners to access their pensions.
Copyright PUNCH.
All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.
Contact: editor@punchng.com