SON goes tough on lubricant adulterators, seizes products, arrests culprits

By Ezurike Ugochukwu

Geared towards fighting rampant cases of motor accidents and machine breakdown caused by the use of adulterated lubricants, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) has sealed a plaza where the faking takes place in Lagos.

The plaza located at the Trade Fair Complex in Lagos was last Thursday seal over adulteration of established lubricants that are sold to unsuspecting end users.

Salim, SON , DG

The SON Director-General, Mallam Farouk Salim while carrying out the exercise said lubricants and packaging materials worth millions of Naira were seized during the operation, as two suspects were caught in the act, while others escaped immediately they sighted the SON’s enforcement team.

Represented by SON’s Coordinator, Surveillance, Intelligence and Monitoring (SIM) Unit, Isa Sulieman, the DG stressed that the agency will never compromise standard in local productions.

He restated the agency’s resolve to working relentlessly at ensuring that local manufacturers are protected to provide job opportunities for the nation’s teeming unemployed youths. He vowed that other locations where adulterated lubricants were being manufactured would be fished out to bring sanity to the nation’s lubricant market.

“What we have seen so far is that there are quite a lot of locations where this activity is going on and we have seized the products we saw and have also made some arrests.

“This is a very big problem and SON is very interested. We have also been directed to bring this act to the barest minimum.

“What they do is adulterate the established brands in a bid to deceive the unsuspecting consumers, but based on intelligence reports, we got here and caught them in the act.

“These are lubricants used for machinery not only for vehicles. So many companies have stopped operations because of the nefarious activities of these unscrupulous dealers in fake and substandard goods,” he said.

The SON DG decried that from available records,  most of the perpetrators of this act were dealers who had been previously prosecuted, he however assured that the enforcement would be a continuous process.

“The ones we have seen we are evacuating right away, but we are suspecting that all the shops have the products.

“We are also going as far as asking for the shop owners because they have to be liable. There is no way they can claim ignorance of the illegal act,” he said.

Reacting, the Chief Security Officer, Plaza,  Trade Fair Complex, Chief Onyeka Ozorkwalu, said the association’s several efforts at stopping this illicit act has not yet yielded the desired fruit.

“We all know that there are people faking products and we are not in support of this trade. We have reported to the police to deter them from this kind of business,”’ Ozorkwalu said.

Ozorkwalu assured that the association will work with SON to fight alliteration in the market, added that the association had appealed to the people in question, educated them on the negative effect of such action.

In the recent time, SON has taken the sensitization on the dangers of faking products as well as brand faking to major markets in Lagos and to other parts of the country such as Enugu and Kano states.