Manufacturers in Aba, the commercial hub of the State, whose products are yet to be certified by regulatory agencies, like the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) or the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) have been advised to do so, to enable them compete at the international market.
Governor Okezie Ikpeazu, of Abia State, who gave the advice during the launch of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) Clinic in Aba, by Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, urged the manufacturers to be proud of their products, by putting their brand names and logo on their products.
Rather than see SON and NAFDAC as policemen and people, who come to set up barricades and bottlenecks, the Governor urged them to see these organizations as partners and enablers in the part towards progress and greatness.
According to him, “there is nothing like fake wine, it becomes fake, when you put another person’s lable or logo on it. If you produce a fruit wine, feel free to call it anything you want to call it and be proud of your product.
“Get the certification and let it compete with other products in the market. But because of the bottlenecks of these registrations, what you see in the market here is that people sell ghost sachet water, ghost in the sense that what you see is the sachet, but not water.
“They buy the sachet with NAFDAC number and then go and fill it with whatever water, whether the water has NAFDAC certification or not, I do not know. So, the NAFDAC number you see on the sachet water belongs to the sachet and not the water and this is what we want to change”.
He promised to provide lands for regulatory agencies that want to set up offices in Aba or Umuahia, to aid their operations in the State. “This is also in a way to underscore the speed with which we deliver things in Abia”.
Ikpeazu described as appropriate, the choice of Aba, as the first host of the MSME Clinic, noting that the energy Aba people deploy to the production of things that they can do with their hands is very infectious and electrifying.
“Anything you ask an Aba man to produce, you will not get a no for an answer. If you ask him to produce a humanbeing, he would go to his backyard, produce the humanbeing, but the humanbeing may not be able to talk.
“This is my way of understanding the spirit of resilience, a can-do-spirit of the Aba person. The energy Aba people deploy to the production of those things they can do with their hands is very infectious and electrifying.
“And because I grew up here, I know it, I felt it and I want to say that from the mustard seed, which was planted by Enyinaya Abaribe, who started by pointing the way towards made-in-Aba and which has been orchestrated by my humble self, those in my cabinet and other Nigerians, I am excited that today it has drawn the attention of no less a person than the president himself to Aba.
“Today’s event is simply Mr. Acting President’s initiative to bring down all the line agencies and ministries that are associated with the production and certification of one item or the other.
“I think that if we continue in this trajectory, time will come when people will sit down in their houses, make phone calls to the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) or NAFDAC to say yes, there is a product that I’m conceptualizing, there is something I have produced, what do I need to do to take it to the next level? Rather than see SON and NAFDAC as policemen and people, who come to harass or people who come to set up barricades and bottlenecks”.
GODFREY OFURUM
