• Rickey Tarfa lied about his age, EFCC alleges

The Standards Organisation of Nigeria [SON] has announced plans to checkmate countries known for making such products and bringing them into Nigeria as part of the renewed commitment to stamp out sub-standard products in the country,
The Acting Director General/Chief Executive, Dr. Paul Angya, said one of the ways to achieve the feat would be the strengthening and smoothening of SON’s Conformity Assessment Programme [SONCAP], a key pre requisite for importation of goods into the country.
At a meeting with Independent Accredited Firms [IAFs] last weekend, in Lagos, Angya maintained that Nigeria would no longer waste its scarce foreign exchange to bring in sub-standards goods which endanger lives, property and the nation’s economy.
He said the fortification of the SONCAP scheme would ensure that sub-standard goods do not find their way into the country anymore.
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In a press statement sent to SHIPPING DAY from the organization, the Acting Director General, explained that ‎the SONCAP remained pivotal towards attaining SON’s mandate and determination to rid the nation of substandard products.

He said as a way of going forward; SON‎ would be looking at the overall operations of the SONCAP and also strengthening the programme by restructuring its entire engagement with imported products, merging one of its new models with the SONCAP programme

“We will also strengthen the SONCAP department to be able to deliver on its mandate of delivering safe and standard products to Nigerians. We understand our mandate to be very simple, to facilitate the provision of safe and valuable products to Nigerians and this mandate is by the elaboration of standards and also making sure that these standards are applied throughout Nigeria.”

“SONCAP is on the front burner and if we as a standards body wants to succeed in our ambition to rid the country completely of substandard goods and to manifest our policy of zero tolerance, then we must keep this programme very close to our hearts,” he stressed.
He stated that SONCAP scheme is very key to achieving the agency’s agenda, pointing out plans to use the initiative to key into the change mantra of the current administration.

“The scheme needs to be seen and operated transparently to impact the nation. The impact can only be felt by the reduction on the level of substandard products in the country.”

According to him, ‎products coming from overseas are the biggest challenge faced by the agency, adding that most of the imported goods do not meet the minimum requirements of the Nigerian Industrial Standard (NIS).

‎In his words, “Our challenge remains the products coming from overseas because for products made in Nigeria, the IAFs are always on top of the game to make sure that these goods meets the minimum requirement of the standards, but those that come in through our porous borders and predominantly from Asia are the goods giving us problems.‎”

Meanwhile, Angya equally disclosed that plans were underway to further bring down the influx of substandard products to the barest minimum, saying that eradication of substandard products in the country was key to supporting the federal government’s quest for economic diversification.

‎”Within Nigeria we have had no problem because we have a team of experts that go round the country and we can say in most industries in Nigeria, their products conform to Nigerian standards. The problem is not what is made in Nigeria but what comes from outside the country,” he reiterated.

Also speaking at the event, the Managing Director, Intertek International Limited, Mr. Victor Faleye, ‎said IAFs’ expectation was for the SONCAP scheme to continue effectively, assuring that IAFs would strive to improve on areas of shortcomings to achieve the best from the scheme.

“We will also ensure that the issue of substandard products if not eradicated, but will be reduced to the barest minimum.”

He said the government has done what it needed to do by providing a platform to see the quality of products coming into the country and also subjecting them to the right tests to ensure that the quality of these products conform with what are obtainable in the developed world.

To Faleye, the task of ensuring that the country was rid of substandard products was not only the responsibility of the IAFs, but also that of the importers and the exporters overseas.
“When buying any product, the NIS standards are there, it is the guidelines that you need to meet and also ensure that you ask the exporters to conform to the guidelines and as importers, ‎ when you ask for quality products, you are assisting us in carrying out our tasks. It is not about 80 per cent reduction, but about total eradication. We are not substandard people so we do not need substandard products. What is good for the developed economy is also good for Nigerians because we are spending our hard earned foreign exchange and you are also aware that the foreign exchange is scarce so we cannot afford‎ to spend our foreign exchange to import substandard products,” Faleye disposed.

Recently, SON’s services and certificates were automated into Nigeria Integrated Customs Information System [NICIS]. This development, according to agency sources, would facilitate trade and help drive the Operation e-Flush campaign of the agency successfully.
Among SON technical partners and IAFs that attended the meeting with the Acting DG, SON, are Cotecna, CCIC, SGS and Intertek

In the meanwhile,  the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on Monday accused Mr. Rickey Tarfa of falsifying his age, urging Justice Mohammed Idris of a Federal High Court in Lagos not to allow a further and better affidavit filed by the Senior Advocate of Nigeria in support of his N2.5bn suit against the EFCC.

“He who comes to equity must come with clean hands,” lawyer for the EFCC, Mr. Wahab Shittu, said on Monday while moving a counter-affidavit to Tarfa’s application seeking to tender a better and further affidavit to support his case.

An EFCC operative, Moses Awolusi, claimed in a counter-affidavit, that though Tarfa gave his age as 43 in the statement he made to the EFCC on the day of his arrest, findings showed that Tarfa’s real age is 54.

“I know as a fact that the applicant, in his extrajudicial statement to the 1st respondent upon his arrest, falsely stated that his age was 43 years in the document marked Exhibit 1 to the counter-affidavit of the 1st respondent dated 18th February, 2016, whereas the true age of the applicant, as stated in the compendium published for all Senior Advocates of Nigeria referred to, is 54 years old,” Awolusi averred.

But Tarfa’s lawyer, Chief Bolaji Ayorinde (SAN), urged Justice Idris to discountenance the EFCC’s claim, saying that anyone could misrepresent his age under the kind of treatment that the EFCC subjected Tarfa to on February 5.

“In such a situation, I would put my age at 25 because I will be u nder shock,” Ayorinde said.

Ayorinde argued that what the EFCC needed to concentrate on was how it would debunk Tarfa’s claim that an Access Bank account into which his law firm paid N225,000 into on January 7, 2014 belonged to one Mohammed Awal Yunusa and not Justice Mohammed Nasir Yunusa as the EFCC had claimed.

Ayorinde urged the judge to admit Mohammed Awal Yunusa’s further and better affidavit in support of Tarfa’s N2.5bn fundamental rights enforcement suit against the EFCC, saying it was in the interest of justice to do so.

But the EFCC’s lawyer, Shittu, described Tarfa’s application as an abuse of court processes and a ploy to arrest the judgment of the court, which was earlier slated for delivery on Monday.

Shittu, who claimed that Tarfa had already admitted paying N225,000 to the judge and had also lied to the EFCC about his age, said the SAN did not deserve the discretionary favour of the court.

The anti-graft agency had earlier alleged that it traced the payment of N225,000 from Tarfa’s law firm into Justice Yunusa’s Access Bank account, claiming that it was a bribe.

In response to the allegation, Tarfa had, in a further affidavit deposed to by the head of his chambers, John Odubela, denied bribing the judge, stating that the N225,000 he paid into the judge’s bank account was donated by some friends of Justice Yunusa towards the funeral rites of the judge’s father-in-law, Alhaji Audi Damasa.

Odubela had said, “That the applicant and some friends of Honourable Justice M.N. Yunusa made some donations for the said funeral rites and to commiserate with the judge since they could not physically go and commiserate with him in Maiduguri, where he was.

“That the contributed monies amounted to N225,000, which was given to the applicant with the responsibility to get same across to the bereaved judge.

“That the applicant consequently made arrangement to forward the sum of N225,000.”

But in the better and further affidavit, which Tarfa sought to tender, Mohammed Awal Yunusa claimed to be the owner of the Access Bank account into which Tarfa’s law firm paid N225,000 into on January 7, 2014, contrary to the EFCC’s claim that the account belonged to Justice Mohammed Nasir Yunusa.

Shipping Day with additional report Punch