A final onslaught against substandard and fake Information and Communication Technology equipment began at the Computer Village, Ikeja, on Saturday, culminating in the Standards Organisation of Nigeria, traders and operators of the village agreeing on a five-month deadline to rid the market of fake and substandard products.
At the end of the ultimatum, SON operatives would embark on an enforcement and sanitization drive that might land defaulting operators going to jail.
Famous for multi-billion naira deals in ICT equipment, the business cluster is not wanting in sales of substandard products, and so operators were willing to embark on a session of house-cleaning to avert the regulator’s hammer.
After what looked like a medieval horse-jack battle, Odumodu’s entourage finally entered the village, heading straight for the offices of the traders’ unions. Anxiety rented the air, while alertness took over the faces and disposition of an average dealer or trader on sighting the Federal Government- branded number plates in the DG’s entourage.
Some of Odumodu’s foot soldiers had already gone into the market for quick surveys as a way of refuting or substantiating earlier intelligence report obtained about the market.
At the secretariat of the PAPDAN, Odumodu and his team met the executive members of the traders’ association and its ally—the Computer and Allied Products Distributors Association of Nigeria.
Odumodu told the PAPDAN representatives that the visit was necessitated by a number of important reasons, especially that SON had been receiving a lot more complaints about the Computer Village than it used to get and that the matter was giving the agency concern
He said his enforcement team had carried out surveillance about such complaints, leading to the impounding of some products suspected to be substandard or not meeting some registration requirements.
The DG raised issues over products quality, particularly the preponderance of unregistered brands in the market, dealers without addresses and even the treatment of customers by the dealers.
Out of the five major phone manufacturers, whose brands are on sale at the market, only one was discovered to have obtained a formal registration. Odumodu, however, said the visit was to sound a final note of warning to others to comply with the registration requirements or be ready for the consequences.
He advised them against delving into businesses that would cost people their lives or make them lose their hard-earned money or property. He restated his warn ing that the dealers must be ready to accept products from customers whenever such failed to deliver the service for which they were bought.
He noted that there were dealers who had apparently decided to work ethically, saying such people would get the support of the Federal Government, through its agencies like the SON. Conversely, he said those who had decided to sabotage the economic efforts of the government, through dealings in substandard products, would be prosecuted.
Odumodu said that even in the midst of unscrupulous dealers, one could decide to be different and such a difference would pay off on the long run, adding that such would be patronised by many more customers.
“The problem is that many of us appear to be in a hurry to make money. That is not good. The only way for Nigeria to make the needed progress is for everybody to decide to change their practices for better.
“I would advise that you organise yourselves, clean up anything that is wrong. My job is to ensure that products we manufacture or sale in Nigeria safe one, and also perform the functions the manufacturers say they are supposed to perform, and that such products do not cause environmental hazards”.
According to him, the move was also necessary to reiterate to the traders that the SON was not interested in closing up any business, but to let them understand that part of the agency’s mandate is to help genuine businesses to grow.
The SON boss said he was ready to collaborate with the traders’ association to ensure that the market was effectively sanitised.
In his response, the President of PAPDAN, Mr. Iyke Nwosu, thanked the SON DG and his team for the visit, describing it as a welcome development. He said the association had been working on some strategies aimed at sanitising the market, adding however that the it was not a task that could be effectively handled by the association.
Nwosu said a major challenge they had faced was the fact that “some of the counterfeiters do not have shops or traceable addresses.”
He added that the association was ready to collaborate with the SON once the modalities were worked out to ensure that the problem was stamped out of the market.
He assured the SON team that fake and substandard products’ rate would have dropped at the end of the five-month ultimatum.
From Punch:
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