Certifying Nigeria’s artisans
Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) recently announced plans to certify artisans in Nigeria. The affected artisans include tailors, barbers, masons, carpenters, cobblers and other micro, small and medium scale service providers. Also to be included are operators in events management, automobile repairers and car washers, to name but a few. SON’s Director General and Chief Executive Officer Dr Osita Anthony Abolomo announced this in Abuja during the recent African Standardisation Day.
According to him, the purpose of the exercise is to enhance quality of services provided by such enterprises and to promote customer satisfaction. He said the move will create orderliness and promote competitiveness among operators and thereby enhance economic growth and national development. Abolomo said, “Our own business is to ensure provision of quality and safe goods, building materials that do not collapse and kill people, clothing that do not cause skin irritation, amongst others. Our watch word is quality and we will be unrelenting in this drive.”
He also said the collapse of buildings through the use of substandard materials is an issue of concern to SON. This is just as his organisation is not unmindful of the activities of unscrupulous Nigerians and foreigners who engage in importation or smuggling of substandard products as well as faking and adulteration. To curb the menace, he said his agency has been synergising with sister agencies while calling on Nigerians to be vigilant and report such cases to the authorities. The foregoing has been reinforced with the creation of awareness in the society on the dangers of substandard products. The campaign has also been extended to schools where standards clubs are being established. The initiative of the agency has yielded dividends as some arrests of culprits have been made, Abolomo said.
When viewed against the high price that Nigerian consumers pay due to proliferation of fake and substandard products in Nigerian markets coupled with poorly trained artisans, SON’s idea of certifying the country’s artisanal sector is commendable. The exercise if effectively carried out, offers a lot of promise to the country, given that these MSMEs provide much of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The history of technologically advanced countries of the world records that their present successes in industrial productivity was enhanced by certification of their artisans. The case of the United Kingdom is instructive as its industrial revolution which facilitated the global trend of standardised industrial production was kick started by that country’s guild system that aggregated artisans into groups where standards for products and services were enforced.
Many Nigerians will however say that SON is biting more than it can chew; that it has not delivered on its primary mandate of regulating sub-standard industrial products and is trying to expand its mandate to include regulating artisans. At present Nigeria is awash with fake and sub-standard building materials, electrical goods, cables, light bulbs, footwear, automobile spare parts, plumbing materials and the like. Every Nigerian has stories to tell about sub-standard industrial products. Most of these products are imported into the country but whether imported or locally manufactured, it is SON’s duty to police these products and establish that they are of standard quality before they are released into the markets. Right now this is poorly done and it costs this country billions if not trillions of naira every day.
It is true that even if building materials, vehicle spare parts and other industrial products are of the right quality, huge damage can be done to consumers and end users if artisans are poorly trained and uncertified. Here comes the value of certifying artisans but this task need not be undertaken by SON. In the olden days, right from the colonial era, this country had a robust system of certification of artisans through the City and Guilds system. That is the system that we should revive immediately.