SON raids markets to evacuate uncertified lubricants

Standards Organisation of Nigeria

By Editor

Worried about the volume of uncertified lubricants in the markets, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) has embarked on a nationwide mop-up of such products as a measure safeguarding the lives of consumers as well as protecting the industrial sector. Indeed, the agency stated that the impact of fake and counterfeited lubricants on the economy is huge and such products are threats to the nation’s manufacturing industry.
The Director General, SON, Osita Aboloma, during an enforcement exercise to raid different markets and warehouses in Lagos in search of adulterated and uncertified lubricants, explained that the agency has been reinvigorated courtesy of its new SON Act 2015 to remove all non-complying products from the nation’s market, in an effort to enhance the capacity utilization of Nigeria’s manufacturing industry.
Aboloma who was represented by the Director, Compliance, SON, Bede Obayi also disclosed that the special raid was targeted at markets and warehouses where suspected substandard products were stocked or sold.
In his words, “The special raid is in accordance with our mandate that all non-complying products must be removed from the markets of this country and this special raid is targeted at anywhere we suspect that there is substandard products and this is why embarked on the raiding of warehouses and markets where suspected substandard lubricants are sold to unsuspecting consumers.
We also seized cables and textile materials because we want to make this country a place where indigenous manufacturers can come and produce.”
“We do not want these unscrupulous importers to flood this country with substandard products.
We want the capacity utilization of Nigerian companies to improve so as to employ the teeming unemployed Nigerian youths and it can only be so when these substandard products are removed from the nation’s market.
This is why we have stopped at nothing in getting everything that is suspected to be substandard out of the markets.”
‘’This is just the starting point and we have not got to where we want to be. This is a fight that we are not going to stop until we finish removing most of the substandard products in circulation.
It is the mandate of the organization to ensure that Nigerians enjoy safe and non hazardous products whenever they buy products.
“Today, you have seen that made-in-Nigeria products especially cables have become the order of the day where these importers go abroad to buy imported products and clone them as if they are made in this country and this is what we cannot allow to continue to happen in this country.