‘Nigeria losing war against sub-standard goods due to SON’s absence at ports’
Dr. Paul Angya is the acting Director-General of the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON). A lawyer and scholar, specialising in standardisation and consumer protection laws, he explains, in this interview with Business Editor, ADE OGIDAN and FEMI ADEKOYA the raison d’etre behind the dominance of sub-standard goods in the nation’s markets, despite laws empowering the agency to act, even as he bemoans the pangs of these unsavoury goods on the nation’s economy.
So far, will you say SON has been able to successfully address the issue of sub-standard products?
SON has done very well in addressing the issue of quality in Nigeria in terms of its primary mandate, which is to elaborate and publish standards for the public consumption. SON has elaborated standards probably for all available products in this country. There are existing standards, which form the basis for evaluating the quality of products. In terms of quality assurance for in the locally manufactured goods, SON has achieved about 90 per cent success. I will say probably all industries that are producing in Nigeria legitimately, including the medium and the small-scale enterprises, are constantly under SON’s inspection and auditing, both in their processes and their products for certification. I can even tell you to a degree of certainty that products manufactured in Nigeria, on the average, conform with quality parameters and so to that extent, SON has achieved a major success.
Which products are yet to be covered by your standardisation initiatives?
The areas that are not covered are goods produced in the dark. These are those being produced illegitimately from illegal factories and those who are faking other people’s products. Those people who start production at 1am and finish by 4am and those who produce behind closed doors. There is nothing SON can do about it. The areas that are not covered are not in terms of product standards but in terms of our inability to enforce the application of standards to those people producing in the dark. Otherwise, we have standards for every product produced and consumed in Nigeria. You will not believe that we have standards for products like garri, kunu and zobo. So, we have standards for virtually everything that is available in Nigeria. It is the implementation of these standards in certain sectors that forms our limitations and then of course, substandard products that are imported from outside Nigeria for which we are not able to or we are not allowed to verify and enforce their conformity with standards.
So, those kinds of products are the areas where I will say our percentage of success in terms of quality assurance is low, but for those that are legitimately producing in Nigeria, industries that are registered and open to our inspection, audit and advice, implementation of standards is near 100 per cent.
What is the agency doing in terms of stakeholders’ enlightenment to further address the influx of sub-standard goods?
Standards’ management is not a destination, but a journey without an end. So, that applies to getting people to know the kind of standards that are applicable to products. Even nature itself has not been fully discovered. Everyday there is a new discovery in the world. The same thing in life; every day, we discover new people, even new tribes are still being discovered in Nigeria. The work of communicating, educating and sensitising the people about the available standards, the benefits of these standards and the application to their products and their way of life is a continuous journey that will never end.
We have over the last two years, even before I took over, designed and initiated strategies, programmes, enlightenment and education initiatives informing people about the relevant standards, their application and the benefits to manufacturers, consumers and to the nation. We believe if the people understand the nature and benefits of standards and embrace standards, the culture of standardisation will be planted in Nigeria and the issue of patronage of sub-standard products would be an issue of the past. For me and my management, enlightenment and education are key pillars in delivering our mandate.
What are the challenges being encountered by the SON in the discharge of its mandate?
We have three major challenges, out of which two are within the ambit of responsibilities of government to SON. One of them is the cultural background and the level of development which will require all Nigerians to solve. The first major challenge we have is the unchecked influx of sub-standard products into Nigeria. These products come in and they compete with our locally manufactured products unfavourably leading to the closure of industries in Nigeria, thus resulting in unemployment and collapse of the Nigerian economy. It is even more challenging for us because we are unable stem the influx of these products into Nigeria as we are not allowed to operate at the points where these products are coming into the country, contrary to the provision of the SON law saying that SON should verify quality of products at the sea ports and major entry points of Nigeria.
The former government of President Jonathan, sometime in 2012, ordered SON out of the sea ports and more than 90 per cent of the products coming into the country come through the sea ports and our inability to man those sea ports have permitted the influx of these sub-standard products and they are killing the local industries. So, that is one challenge.
The second challenge is when these products escape or come into Nigeria because we are not present at that time to check their coming in and they are circulating in Nigeria among 170 million people within a geographical spread of over 5000 square kilometers, then we do not have the sufficient personnel to police the environment to go round and dictate where each and every product of sub-standard quality is circulating. SON has a workforce of less than 1500, so the strategic positioning at the port is a major challenge to us and the insufficiency of personnel is also compounding our problem of being able to chase these products around the country and apprehend them. Like the issue of sub-standard tyres in the country, I had to deploy staff in every state of the country over the last one month to track and investigate where fake and substandard tyres are being traded to seize them, but this alone has taken the whole personnel of SON.
The customs have confirmed that there are about 400 land borders in Nigeria and we are supposed to man each of these land borders to make sure that sub-standard products do not come in and if we, for instance just post five people in each of these borders multiplied by 400, that is about 2000 people, which is already more than the whole workforce of SON. We do not even have enough officers to man our borders before we even talk about our offices that are present in the 36 states of the federation. Our laboratories, our factory inspection, factory audit, market survey, product registration and the likes will be left out. So, personnel insufficiency is also a major challenge.
The third is the level of awareness of the Nigerian public. It is rudimentary. The capacity of the average Nigerian to evaluate a product upon visual inspection and to determine the quality of the product is limited. So, their ability to identify a quality product without the help of SON or other public regulatory agencies is limited and this is also a major challenge and this requires our resources and our time to educate, inform and enlighten them about the quality of products and how to identify them. So, these are the challenges we are facing.
Have you made recommendations to the current administration especially inrespect of your absence at the ports and the issue of inadequate manpower?
We have done that. In the last three months. I have been in communication with the Minister of Industry, Trade and Development because this is the avenue of getting to the government. I have made written presentations to the minister about all these issues and I am happy to say that I am receiving good attention from the ministry because right now as I am speaking to you, I have been asked to detail my requirements in terms of personnel and how I will deploy them at the ports, because I have told them SON will need a minimum of 10000 graduates for greater effectivess. I have been told to justify that and I have also been told to justify my push for positioning at the sea ports and I have tendered my discussions with the federal government and we are beginning to see positive attention and if eventually government sees the point with me and approves our needs, especially in the area of manpower, it will take off 10000 graduates from the streets, as we can recruit 300 from every state, you know the impact it will make on the unemployment market and additionally, it will give us the capacity to fight the circulation of substandard products in Nigeria. If we return to the seaports, we can do this job effectively.
For instance, the law prescribes that SON should man every inch of ground in Nigeria where commercial enterprise is being undertaken to ensure compliance with standards specifications while also authorising SON to enter any premises where commercial undertaken is being done, but the same government that promulgated this law and of course to be fair to the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, he was not him that gave the order but the previous government ordered us out of the ports and SON cannot just carry itself back to the ports.
Another major challenge is the issue of financing. The SON law provides for a charge on all imported products into Nigeria, which is called the standards levy. Everybody importing Nigeria is supposed to pay a certain percentage of 0.02 per cent to SON’s coffers for purposes of standardization. If those charges are being paid, SON will have sufficient funds to do the duty of standardization and quality regulation throughout Nigeria and even to pay staff salaries. But we cannot go out and enforce it unless the federal government gives an order to say that henceforth, any ship berthing in Nigeria, when you are collecting your tariff, collect 0.02 per cent and pay it into SON’s account.
These are issues we cannot enforce, but then there are other areas where the law has given us capacity. For instance, now the law has permitted us that upon detection we can seize these products by court order and we can detain these products up to a period of 90 days without being challenged by anybody whereas, before you can seize any product or you even see anyone carrying poison to kill a whole community, we could not stop them because we had to go to court and ask for permission to come and stop the person. So, for instance, you see a man in Apapa and you go to Igbosere to get a court order to stop the man, but by the time you go back to Apapa, he would have gone because he cannot be waiting for you. So, this was the major challenge we had, but the law permits that once we see you, we can seize those goods and when you look at the other side of it, the complement of arms that we do not have, we usually have to go with police to back us up to carry out our enforcement activities.
The law also gave us the powers to prosecute directly through our own lawyers. Before now, we were not allowed to prosecute because the law granted prosecutory powers only to the Attorney-General and under him, the lawyers and the leaders in the Ministry of Justice and the police who are acting as agents of the attorney general. So we needed to rely on the police to prosecute matters who often times do not have the expertise because for you to be able to prosecute a dealer of a substandard product, you ought to know the parameters, the standards and quality requirements of that product to be able to make a case which the police do not have. But right nows with the new law, we can authorize lawyers to prosecute. We have the capacity and the requisite knowledge to implement that position of the law.
The arguments raised as regards the presence of SON at the ports border on how regulatory activities affect the ease of doing business in the country. Are you advocating a return to the nation’s seaports?
The decision to order SON out of the ports may have been informed by the circumstances of that time, due to so many agencies at the ports, saying that if they expel most of those agencies at the port it will facilitate ease of doing business at the ports and at that time issues of quality as not on top priority of that government and so it made that order and SON was expelled. Even at that time, we could still ask the question of what is purpose of trade. Is it trading for improvement of the people and the nation and if trading serves as a means of developing the nation and improving the quality of life of people, then the quality of products that are being traded in your country should be of importance to you and of course at that time I was not in the position to argue that so that decision was taken. It may have been well reasoned at that time, but in this present time, when that decision is still being implemented, when the country is being overrun by fake and substandard products, when all local industries are closing up, apart from food products, very little of manufacturing processes is being done in Nigeria because of the availability of cheaper products from off shore and unfortunately these cheaper products do not deliver on the quality. More than 90 per cent of these products are not reasonably fit for the purpose for which they are manufactured.
Why should we go and spend money to produce the thing here when you have to compete with fake and substandard products coming in cheaper and when it comes in, you do not get people to buy your own locally produced product and as a result, your business fails and when there are no more businesses in Nigeria, there will be no employment, the economy is collapsing because of these substandard products coming in from overseas. So, if you aid the benefit of fast tracking trade at the ports, the death of local industries and the economy, then you work out the arithmetic yourself.
I will tell you that the argument is no longer germane because right now, everything is digital at the ports. So, nobody needs to write a signature anywhere. The customs do not physically inspect the goods, it is only regulatory agencies like us that can physically inspect goods because once you load the goods from the point of order, you are tracked online, the amount of the goods on the ship, the cost of the goods and the tariffs mathematically are worked out by the computer and the demand notice is delivered to your address where you will also pay online and by the time the goods arrive, you do not have to go to the ports because they are delivered to your premises. So, it is only issues of quality, when the quality institutions suspect that these products are not meeting with quality they intercept and examine.
The climate is very different from when Jonathan was operating so that argument no longer holds water and additionally, to the fact that the consequences of that order by far outweighs the benefits. So, I will rather you keep a ship here for 20 days than the product of that ship killing the economy of Nigeria and its people.
What are the capacity development initiatives responsible for your standards?
That is one key area where we are committed both in terms of the will and the resources to develop manpower. We are basically a research and application institution. What we do in standardization is that we research into products, methods, facilities and so on, then we prescribe them after coming out with best results. So we encourage all our staff to develop and also organize training programmes locally and internationally are being initiated and sourced.
I want to assure you that with the efforts of SON in place right now through the promulgation of the national quality policy which provides for the necessary quality infrastructure because this is what has been absent in Nigeria and this is what has been present in Ghana, this is what takes Nigerians to Ghana to test their products and this is the quality infrastructure.
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