SON Takes Additional Steps to Combat Substandard Goods

The Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) has announced that it has taken additional measures to combat the influx of fake and substandard goods‎ into the country by introducing a reference code on products in 2016.

Director General, SON, Dr. Joseph Odumodu, during a review meeting for 2015 with International Accredited Firms (IAFs), explained that going forward next year, every SONCAP certificate issued on products must have reference code to ease traceability of substandard products in the country.

In his words, ‎”Going forward, we are introducing additional measures to improve the effectiveness of the SONCAP and some of those measures will be increasing our market surveillance activities and within the first half of next year, to be precise by June, every product we find in the market place without a code, we will interrogate more painstakingly and by September, we will not allow any imported products without the code into the country.”

“What that means is that by September, any product we find within the market in Nigeria will be removed and destroyed. I have stated severally that the Nigerian economy deserves a lot more in terms of local manufacturing capacity and the only way we can achieve that is to ensure that Nigerian made products do not compete with products that are of questionable background and integrity,” he said.

According to him, in the last four years, SON has entered into agreement‎ with the Chinese government, which he said never happened in order to deliberate on how best to combat the influx of substandard goods into the country.

The SON boss added that the agency is also focusing on product liability, saying that anybody who sells a substandard product would be held accountable till the agency traces the original manufacturer of the substandard product.