The Director General of the Social Security Fund (CSS), Assane Soumare pleaded the case for an internalized culture of risk prevention within companies so as to curb accidents that, when they occur, “lead to a multiplication of the scale of consequences from five to 100.”
Speaking in Dakar on Tuesday Soumare said: “Companies allot a lot of resources to technology development, marketing, policies, leaving aside the most essential aspect, that is, prevention. It simply means that you are exposing yourself to the loss of your business”.
He was speaking at the launch of the African Prevention Month held this year under the theme: “Laying the groundwork for Sustainable Prevention in the Workplace in Africa: A Challenge for All”.
According to the Director General of CSS, the prevention culture not only allow companies to sustain and implement prevention in a sustainable way, but it also allows other components of society to avoid the risks either “endogenous or exogenous.”
Addressing the emerging risks related to the discovery of oil and gas off the coast of Senegal, Soumare opined that they need to be well understood thanks to the establishment of a systemic device to allow the society to acquire the ability required to be resilient to any risk.
“Prevention should no longer be seen as an additional cost, but rather as an opportunity because the consequences of non-prevention are more expensive than prevention as such,” he observed.
Soumare called for a better management of skills that are “important elements in the process and the system of prevention of occupational risks, but also in the system of safety and health at the workplace.”
According to the CSS boss “risk prevention fits perfectly within the framework of national economic policies”.
He added that the latest fires that gutted some of the country’s markets are “avoidable”.
ARD/te/pn/as/APA