Africa seeks common laws against counfeits

Daily Monitor Correspondent

Nairobi

Industrial property rights experts are campaigning for the harmonisation of the anti-counterfeiting laws across Africa.

They blame the failure to tackle the menace, which they say has stifled the continent’s industrial growth, on the disjointed legal regime.

At a two-day pan African intellectual property and anti-counterfeiting forum that opened in Nairobi yesterday, delegates from different countries said the counterfeiters were exploiting the vacuum created by lack of clear legal framework at national levels and absence of a common regional policy on counterfeiting to infiltrate the local economies.

“The definition of counterfeit currently varies from region to region and from one country to another, making it difficult for our countries to cooperate in fighting this vice,” said Prof James Odek, the Kenya Industrial Property Rights Institute’s managing director.

On the political front, African countries are already cooperating under African Union while many trading blocs have emerged on the economic front with the latest one being the push to merge EAC, Comesa and SADC create the largest pan African trading bloc in the continent’s history.

“Conflicting legislations of individual countries means even the trading blocs do not have proper legal instrument to support adequate vetting of products that get their way into the continent,” said Mr Gift Sibanda, the African Regional Intellectual Property Rights Organisation’s (ARIPO) director general.

Medicine, cosmetic music and motor vehicle are the industries which according to ARIPO are being forced to scale down on their operations as consumers looking for cheaper items turn to counterfeits.

A common market protocol that is set to be signed by the heads of state of the East African Community countries simply states that the regional governments will cooperate in fighting the menace.

However, so far, only Tanzania has operational law and an institution — the Fair Competition Commission — that specifically deals with the issue of counterfeiting.

Burundi and Rwanda have not enacted any laws to specifically deal with the problem while Uganda and Kenya are in the process of operationalising their anti-counterfeit legislations.

“Even here, Tanzania defines counterfeiting as an act of unfair competition such as mislabelliing of goods while Uganda’s Anti -Counterfeiting Bill 2007 sees it as standards issue to be handled by Uganda Bureau of Standards alone,” said Prof Odek.

So far, Kenya’s anti-counterfeit Act signed into law last December by President Kibaki so far has the most comprehensive definition of counterfeiting in the region.

Prof Odek said the law settled for the five definitions that include competition, standards and consumer welfare angles after stakeholders failed to agree on a single meaning of the vice.

A few weeks ago, industrialisation minister Henry Kosgey appointed a taskforce made up of property rights experts and various stakeholders to advise him on the appropriate date for the gazettement of the Anti -counterfeit Act 2008.

According to Prof Odek, who is a member of the minister’s taskforce, preparations are on top gear for the implementation of the new law as both the Kenya Bureau of Standards and Kenya Revenue authority have been ordered to identify the counterfeit goods depot specified under the Act. The depots will be used to keep seized goods as their fate is determined in courts of law.

The ministry has also written to the AG Chambers to gazette the prosecutors to start working on the cases under the Act while about 1,000 inspectors have already been gazetted and will start inspecting goods suspected to be counterfeits once the new law is operationalised.