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| Dr. Joseph Odumodu, DG, SON |
Last Wednesday, Director General, Standards Organisation of Nigeria SON, Dr. Joseph Odumodu said that his organization will soon embark on electronic product registration in Nigeria.
According to him, all products in the Nigeria market will be expected to have electronic registration code for easy identification of both the manufacturer as well as the importer.
He said that any product that does not carry SON electronic code by May 2013 will be removed from the market and destroyed.
At a media interactive session yesterday Odumodu said “Every product in Nigeria market is expected to been documented. We must know who the manufacturers are, who imported the products and the relationship between the importer and the manufacturer.
We have completed the first 50% of the tenure of this current Director General and to examine what has been achieved, we set to access our performance and improving on the weakness so far.
“One point I would like to stress in talking about 2013, is that we need to change our strategy and we would do most of the things we did last year, but some additional things would be included and I will explain why we have to do them. We have to do them for sustainability, to also connect to the world.
“When I started this job, we all focused on the prevalence of substandard products in Nigeria and the challenge of standardization is that it is measured in terms of the prevalence of substandard product. It is an outcome of a failed system or a non-existed system that leads us to what is currently happening now.
“What I have done in the last two years is to try to beat down the symptoms which are the level of literacy on the consumers in Nigeria and the prevalence of substandard product and every time you force that, The challenge we have in Nigeria is that we don’t have what we call a national quality Policy, and one of the thing we must do this year is to promote and push for a Nation Quality Policy and it is going to go the whole process to the top approval up to the President of the Republic of Nigeria. And that will lead us to identify to what is known as National Quality Infrastructure.
“I would like to say a few words about this policy. Technology is a powerful force that drives the whole world to commonality in product and because of the impact of technology all over the world, today we have what is known as Global Market and customers are the same all over the world with people demanding the same quality in terms of services and at the end of the day it is that concept of commonality in standardize product all over the world that drives over the policy of National Quality Policy.
“A quality policy has a number of rationales for it. The first is that government has the responsibility to efficiently and effectively manage all kind of regulations. Those managed regulations are for the achievement of protecting the citizens; of course more recently we talked about protecting the citizens.
“The second rationale is that the players in the system are expected to be transparent and present themselves to the regulatory environment that government has provided.
“The third rationale is that government needs to give industry or enterprise, supportive standards, metrology, accreditation and conformity assessment services that are accepted globally.”
