How did the Advertising Standards Panel (ASP), the vetting arm of the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, allow a material submitted by Bokku supermarkets chain to pass through its regulatory scrutiny? Or did they not submit it for review and approval before publishing?
The ad is offensive, and if it passed through ASP and ARCON, then the board of the council should be disbanded for promoting the stereotyping of a section of Nigeria and labeling them duplicitous.
If Bokku was joking, it was one taken too far. Except it has the tacit approval of the Nigerian State, in which ARCON must be complicit, there is no way the tribal slur in that ad should be tolerated. Stereotypes in advertising are prevalent, but they are most commonly found in imagery, rather than in ad copy, which is expected to have been vetted and approved by a regulator for public consumption.
The ad, targeting the young middle class, features a young lady in the process of shopping for groceries and talking to herself about the value she’s getting from her new shopping experience. At one point, she talks about the possibility of her “buying beans and Garri Ijebu at Bokku without any Omo Ibo cheating me.”
Now that is totally unacceptable. This campaign has cast an entire tribe as fraudulent businessmen and women who cheat in transactions. It presents the Igbo people as dishonest in business dealings, thereby introducing a new dimension in the stereotyping of Igbo people in Nigeria.
The Igbo people of Nigeria have hitherto been profiled as lovers of money. This stereotype has been reinforced through movies, folklore, pop culture, and social narratives, but this attempt to present them through advertising as a dubious set of people is a new and strange dimension that is apparently sponsored by a regulatory conspiracy.
The entire world has been struggling to rid itself of antisemitism, which took root from little biases and prejudices against Jews in many parts of the world. The Jews were hated for being lovers of money. Labelled usurers because they lent money and collected interests, they became the preoccupation of notable writers such as William Shakespeare, whose book “Shylock”, made a big feast of projecting Jews as desperate money lovers who placed the love of money over human lives. Charles Dickens also did his part in his novel, “Oliver Twist”, in which Hagin, a Jew, is presented as desperately greedy.
These stereotypes penetrated society so deeply that they fuelled the hatred that ignited the Second World War, in which more than six million Jews were incinerated in Gas Chambers in Germany, amidst other killings.
Looking at the ad, one wonders how “Omo Ibo” managed to find its way into a copy that was talking about beans and Ijebu Garri.
In the typical Lagos stereotype, the consumption of beans and Ijebu garri is not typically associated with the Igbo. While young Igbo men deal in foodstuffs, Ijebu garri is not an item they typically stock. Smuggling Igbo into the narrative is as socially inappropriate as it is reprehensible.
In Nigeria, advertising with harmful stereotypes is officially prohibited, and, strangely, ARCON has not recognised the danger of racial tribal slurs in advertising. The ARCON Code prohibits content that is indecent, offensive, or discriminatory. The Code is clear on issues of discrimination, but perhaps falls short of seeing beyond issues relating to gender.
MTN, the country’s telecom giant, got into trouble many years ago because it released an ad that celebrated the boy child. APCON, as it then was, doubled down on the business and forced it to pull the ad. Since then, stronger oversight has been placed on gender stereotyping in advertising in Nigeria, and brands have become a lot more circumspect.
Sterling Bank was caught in the web of another campaign found to be offensive, when in the Easter of 2022, it used the imagery of Agege bread to wish its customers a happy Easter celebration.
The copy that was found offensive merely played on the perception of Agege bread as one that swells quite big in the oven. And was scripted to read, “Like Agege Bread, He rose!”
Nigerian Christians picked up sticks in righteous anger, and ARCON compelled Sterling Bank to apologise.
Let us note that Sterling Bank didn’t directly disparage Christianity; it merely chose a creative street nuance to send its message of goodwill to its customers. But Bokku chose to call the Igbo people fraudulent, characterizing an entire tribe so needlessly negatively.
It is even possible that Bokku intentionally inserted that offensive line in the copy to elicit angry reactions such as this one to trend. But does Bokku need such a negative backlash to grow?
I completely disagree.
Bokku needed to have studied its profile very appropriately in the market before rolling out its campaigns. The neighbourhood shop has carved a decent space for itself already, using its family loaf product as a strategic market entry. The bread has helped bring footfalls and this has significantly encouraged the proliferation of Bokku shops in almost every neighbourhood in the major cities where Bokku shops have been sprouting like weeds over the past two years or so.
Only brands seeking to be noticed go this route for quick recognition. But decent brands that speak to the family avoid controversies such as the type Bokku is drawing to itself. The owner, Adewale Adeyemi, has achieved great success in the few years he has been in the business and should do everything to remove the sort of marketing that is intentionally courting unnecessary storms, which will not add anything to the growth and progress of the business.
Even if he believed this to be important to his business, what about the regulatory authority? Should ARCON not have saved the country the embarrassment of such offensive advertising in a country so badly fractured by divisively centrifugal political rhetoric?
It is not complimentary to ARCON’s regulatory oversight for such a campaign to have slipped through its oversight. If Bokku refused to submit the ad for vetting, then the punishment should be so heavy that it would deter any future effort in a similar direction and for a similar purpose.
More importantly, the ad does not situate the proper cultural context of the Nigerian shopping and consumption culture. ARCON has, for years, been seen to be fighting for the infusion of the appropriate local content in advertising. I recall that was the fight that led to the introduction of the 5th Code of Advertising Practice in Nigeria.
How then did APCON believe that an ad that projects Igbo as the seller of Ijebu Garri would be believable? Ijebu, sprawling towns of enterprising people, is not anywhere near Igbo land.
The garri, named after the Yoruba enclave, is mostly neither traded nor consumed by the Igbo. Part of the attempt to tar the Igbo with the fraud brush, this campaign will fail to convert anybody.
ARCON should be seen to be in a hurry to redeem itself by invoking the highest punishment possible upon the promoters of such a hate-inspiring campaign, especially if it was flown under the regulatory radar. Article 148b of the regulator’s Code of Practice should be applied in its most ruthless sense.
