President Bola Ahmed Tinubu will sign a review act of the Standard Organization of Nigeria (SON) into law that will enable the agency to get jail terms for peddlers of fake products instead of the current situation whereby the culprits are fined in the country, SON disclosed on Thursday.
Director General of SON, Mallam Farouk Salim told journalists in Lagos that the agency had approached the last National Assembly for the review of its act to make sure that peddlers of life threatening materials are jailed.
According to him, “Thankfully they passed the law but unfortunately when the government was settling down, they did not get the opportunity for the president to sign the law. So it is back in the national assembly for concurrence and hopefully very soon it will be with the president and I am sure the president will sign that amendment and those individuals selling threatening items would be jailed immediately if they are caught.”
The SON Chief Executive spoke at the destruction site of sub-standard tyres, motor oil lubricants, cable wire, doors and other fake products worth billions of naira at Amuwo-Odofin in Lagos.
Farouk said “The tyres look new but some of them are used tyres, they are pressed and polished to look new. Some of them are new tyres but unfortunately when the importer was bringing it in, other tyres were stuffed inside it. Due to this, these tyres lose their integrity and the wires break inside the tyres, and they become dangerous to society.”
“The manufacturers of motor oil lubricants use popular products so our Nigerian lubricant manufacturers that are successful have to deal with individuals trying to copy their product. Nobody copies a product that is not successful.”
According to him, “The product you are seeing behind does not belong to that popular company, it was being copied and they have been taken to court, convicted and the court gave us the permission to confiscate the product and destroy them.
The same thing with cable, our cable industry is successful and like I said success breeds copying. The only problem is the copying is a bad one.”
Farouk affirmed that “the Nigerian based cable industry is good and they key into associations to help identify these fake ones and we atimes use our intelligence to find these people out because this is affecting our economy.
Due to the policy, we need to make sure that our indigenous companies are protected.
Some of the cables we cannot destroy pending court judgment, they are all fake products. They are supposed to be copper but they are either iron or copper coated.
