By Omoh Gabriel
Director General, Standard Organisation of Nigeria SON, Dr. Joseph Odumodu yesterday said that his organization will soon embark on electronic product registration in Nigeria. He said all products in the Nigeria market will be expected to have electronic registration code for easy identification of both the manufacturer as well as the importer. He said that any product that does not carry SON electronic code by May 2013 will be removed from the market and destroyed.
At a media interactive session yesterday Odumodu said “Every product in Nigeria market is expected to bee documented. We must know who the manufacturers are, who imported the products and the relationship between the importer and the manufacturer.
We have completed the first 50% of the tenure of this current Director General and to examine what has been achieved, we set to access our performance and improving on the weakness so far.
“One point I would like to stress in talking about 2013, is that we need to change our strategy and we would do most of the things we did last year, but some additional things would be included and I will explain why we have to do them. We have to do them for sustainability, to also connect to the world.
“When I started this job, we all focused on the prevalence of substandard products in Nigeria and the challenge of standardization is that it is measured in terms of the prevalence of substandard product. It is an outcome of a failed system or a non-existed system that leads us to what is currently happening now.
“What I have done in the last two years is to try to beat down the symptoms which are the level of literacy on the consumers in Nigeria and the prevalence of substandard product and every time you force that, The challenge we have in Nigeria is that we don’t have what we call a national quality Policy, and one of the thing we must do this year is to promote and push for a Nation Quality Policy and it is going to go the whole process to the top approval up to the President of the Republic of Nigeria. And that will lead us to identify to what is known as National Quality Infrastructure.
“I would like to say a few words about this policy. Technology is a powerful force that drives the whole world to commonality in product and because of the impact of technology all over the world, today we have what is known as Global Market and customers are the same all over the world with people demanding the same quality in terms of services and at the end of the day it is that concept of commonality in standardize product all over the world that drives over the policy of National Quality Policy.
“A quality policy has a number of rationales for it. The first is that government has the responsibility to efficiently and effectively manage all kind of regulations. Those managed regulations are for the achievement of protecting the citizens; of course more recently we talked about protecting the citizens.
The second rationale is that the players in the system are expected to be transparent and present themselves to the regulatory environment that government has provided.
The third rationale is that government needs to give industry or enterprise, supportive standards, metrology, accreditation and conformity assessment services that are accepted globally. Of course, the government needs to access those conformity assessment services that are affordable because you don’t what to begin to test and make people or make the product expensive”.
“So they have to be affordable and accepted globally and like my technical colleague would say, crest ability, so that when its been tested somewhere, if taken elsewhere, the result would be the same elsewhere. So government needs to have access to conformity assessment services that are affordable and acceptable globally. This is to ensure that product which is tested are certified and accepted everywhere. We are trying to avoid a process whereby a product tested in New York and somebody wants to use it in Nigeria, would go through another test which is capital intensive in a way.
“At the end of the day we need a conformity assessment system that is globally accepted. Unfortunately, we do not have this system here in Nigeria and we have not yet linked to the world and the only way we can be linked to the world is to first of all have a National Quality policy which has itself a building of National Quality Infrastructure and then a very robust metrology system, conformity assessment services, accreditation system. Those are the area that we will focus on by the year 2013 and beyond.
“We are trying to do this because when we started it, nobody not even the next DG of SON can stop it because it will be backed by law up to the highest level and which is what is critical. Once we have this in law, the prevalence of the monstrous standard products will be a thing of the past.
“Having said this, I would also like to point out that the six point Agenda still remains the Agenda because the Agenda has element in it that has already built on the cubing out of the national quality. For example, this year we have already set out some amicable amount of funds for the last three years and that funding would begin the building of the National metrology institute.
“Metrology is the science of measurement and there are three level of metrology. These are scientific metrology which is involved in the highest level of a laboratory metrology standard. We have industrial metrology in which we ensure that equipment used in industries are sufficiently salivated by technically competence systems and of course we have been able to prove to Nigeria that when you walk up to a fueling station and inquired for 20 liters and you are not given that exact required, it is metrology that ensures that there is calibration and standardize so that when it is 20litres, it is exact. “What we have observe is that when customers leave the stations station, they adjust their equipment to do whatever they want to do On the average, we have observed and scientifically proven that if a pomp in Nigeria is delivers 15litres, on the average it delivers 18litres to you. So we are in the process short changing the consumers and that aspect is what we call legal metrology. So metrology is an end to science and today we only have some element of metrology within SON and so we are going to start building a new metrology institute”.
