The Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), says it has forwarded a bill to the National Assembly seeking for powers to prosecute manufacturers and importers of fake and sub-standard goods.

The Director-General of SON, Dr. Joseph Odumodu, made the disclosure in Abuja yesterday.

Odumodu decried the rate at which fake and sub-standard products were brought into the country particularly by foreign nationals.

He noted that sometimes when the manufacturers and importers of these fake goods were apprehended, SON lacked the power to prosecute them.

“So we already have our bill in the National Assembly and we are seeking for increased penalties even up to the level of forfeiture and incarceration.

“Incarceration because we haven’t sent anybody to jail, not to my knowledge, why because we do not have prosecutorial powers.

“If we catch anybody, only the police or the Attorneys-General of the states of the federation have the power to prosecute; so when we catch people we can seize their items, but we hand them over to other agencies to do the prosecution.

“We are the ones who know where it pinches and we know sometimes how bad it is for somebody and sometimes, non-nationals bring in products that can kill Nigerians.

“Some of those people will never do that in their own countries; but we are not able to do anything, so we are seeking those powers to be able to prosecute people, to incarcerate them and take them to jail.’’

Speaking on the circulation of used tyres popularly referred to as “Tokunbo’’ in the country, Odumodu told reporters that SON had so far seized five million of them nationwide in the last four months.

According to him, a survey conducted by SON showed that more than 60 per cent of used tyres in the market are sub-standard.

The director-general said that people who did not own their own vehicles were most at risk, adding that almost all taxi cabs in the country use sub-standard tyres.

He stated that it was against this backdrop that SON embarked on awareness and enlightenment campaign to educate consumers on the date of manufacture (DOT) sign on tyres which states the expiry date and urged them to always look out for the dates before boarding commercial vehicles.

“We did a survey on tyres and we found out that over 60 per cent of tyres that are used in the market were not of the right standards.

“Indeed the people who commute on a daily basis; people who do not own vehicles are most at risk because all the ‘kabu-kabu’, all these taxi cabs, most of them run on used tyres and that was why we started the campaign on DOT, that everybody must be educated.

“And anybody who wants to enter a public transport, you have a right to look at the tyre of the vehicle you want to board and if the DOT tells you that the tyre has expired, you make noise about it.

“In fact the driver can be tried for murder or premeditated murder because if a DOT is XY06, it means that that tyre was manufactured in 2006 and no tyre should last for more than four years, so 2010, that tyre would have expired.

“So far we have removed five million used tyres from circulation. If you know anybody in Lagos, ask them about the Fatai Atere market; that market remains closed up till today. We removed over three million tyres from that market and all of them have been destroyed.’’