The Director General and Chief Executive Officer, Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON), Anthony Osita Abuloma has enjoined all manufacturers or industrialists in Nigeria, particularly those operating in the southeast zone of the country to quickly embrace the mobile calibration services offered by the organisation.
Abuloma said that without proper certification of locally made products in line with the international standards, it would be impossible for such products to be accepted or marketed abroad.
He said: “The importance of calibration is very necessary. It is for the benefit of the factories. It will help manufactures to build confidence in their products. When you plan to export, and you have good calibration service, people are sure of your instruments, people are sure of your products; because if you don’t calibrate, and you are a producer – all those components that make up your products, how do you measure them? They might not be accurate. So calibration is very important; it saves life, protects the environment, ensures fairness in trade because if you don’t calibrate, is either you’re cheating people or you are cheating yourself,” he said.
The Director General spoke on Wednesday at a forum tagged “General Sensitization on: Mobile Calibration Equipment,” organized yesterday by the SON in collaboration with Turaki Heritage Limited for manufacturers/industrialists and other stakeholders within the southeast zone in Enugu.
According to Abuloma, “Any product you want to export must have a test report; without a test report, nobody will buy your products…To ensure that our products are of the same standard with international products, manufacturers must produce goods and services that are acceptable to international customers. You must produce something that is safe, not harmful to human health or environment…And you need to export your products; when you start exporting, you create jobs, make more money for the country. We need to look beyond the local market.”
He explained that calibration is a process in which SON compares readings of measuring instruments of industrialists against a reference standard, noting that one of the advantages of calibration was to ensure accuracy level of a measuring instrument such as a thermometer, a chamber like oven, furnace, fridge, among others.
He further explained that mobile calibration is a vehicle with in-built laboratory which can move from one location to another in order to offer calibration services within the premises of industrialists and manufacturers rather than the manufacturers coming to SON offices for calibration services.
“So, it’s either you come and do calibration in our laboratory at our offices or we use the mobile lab, go to your own company premises and do it in our own vehicle. So we can do the calibration in our mobile lab within your premises in remote areas. We can travel as far as anywhere to do the calibration for you,” he said.
Represented on the occasion by the Director, National Metrology Institute of SON, Engr Obiora E. Manafa, the DG also spoke on the competing power of Nigerian products when placed with products from other parts of the world.
“Our local products can compete favourably with all the products all over the world. The only thing is to build that quality infrastructure to it. I told you that at a point, Nigerian yams were rejected when they were exported. But the same Nigerian yams were taken to Ghana – when Nigeria didn’t have accredited labs, and later, the same Nigerian yams passed through Ghana’s calibration process, the yams were exported to Europe, and they started eating them because they had been certified ok after calibration,” he said.
