By ANDREW OJIEZEL
THE Acting Director General of Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), Paul Angya, has vowed to treat dealers in fake and substandard tyres as murderers.
Speaking with Commerce and Industry Correspondents in Lagos recently, Angya expressed his disappointment over the rate some tyre dealers are deliberately importing substandard or fake tyre thereby endangering lives of innocent motorists.
“They will henceforth be treated as murderer because their case is beyond corruption. Although corruption is very bad but people should know that a person who corruptly enriched himself/herself will not involve lives. But dealers in fake and substandard products including tyres can kill many within seconds as was the case that involved death of Minister of State for Labour recently”.
Reacting to question from stakeholders over alleged corruption within SON by the workers, Angya stated that “To eliminate corruption from SON, we are going to introduce e-payment, e-invoice and e-receipt to stamp out corruption from the system.”
Stressing the readiness of SON to win the war against substandard tyre, he noted that of the 8,986 accidents which were recorded in 2015, resulting in the deaths of 4,100, 732 people died as a result of tyre burst.
On need to make products from Nigeria more acceptable worldwide, he stated that the organization vision is to get closer to the people so that their goods and farm products will be up to global standard.
“To ease our work and improve quality of goods and products in Nigeria, we are working to improve expansion of SON facilities across the country so that people in Sokoto will not travel to Maiduguri to text their products”.
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The SON helmsman stated that the agency is doing its best to strengthen its laboratories system to ensure that Nigeria products will not be rejected in oversea. “What many of our farmers did before now was to take their products abroad after they had undergone laboratory test in Ghana, a result, those products carry always carry Ghanian name and make Ghana always take the glory because such products always carry the name of Ghana and Ghana government will take the glory.”
He affirmed that the practice of taking Nigeria products to another country and label them another country name is over. Likewise, some of the tyre dealers who were in the forum expressed their readiness to cooperate with SON on tracking of fake and substandard tyres, saying “We are ready to join hands in the fight against substandard or expired tyre. But we want everyone to know that no matter how genuine vehicle tyres may be, bad roads can also lead to accidents. Our government should also concentrate on road.
The President of tyre dealers association, OkeyNdibe, urged government to tackle road network which have become death traps across the country, saying “SON should not heap the blame on tyre alone, because it will be wasted efforts if we have genuine tyre without good roads but our road are in terrible state.”