Reinforcement bars are critical to maintaining the integrity of concrete used in construction. According to experts, a compromise can lead to building collapse. Yet, some manufacturers have flooded the market with substandard iron and steel, putting lives and property at risk. The manufacturers are also defrauding the government in underpayment of taxes and levies. Assistant Editor CHIKODI OKEREOCHA reports.
Manufacturers of substandard iron and steel products are on the prowl. This has raised fears of possible collapse of more buildings across the country.
The Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) raised the alarm that substandard had iron and steel products have flooded the market. The agency said it took painstaking monitoring and enforcement by its task force to discover that most manufacturers of the products are now cutting corners on the required standards.
SON, through its immediate past Director-General, Dr. Joseph Odumodu, said steel products that were supposed to measure 16 millimetres (mm) in diameter were discovered to measure only 14mm. This, according to him, falls short of acceptable standards by 2mm with a significant impact on the overall strength. Those that were supposed to measure 12mm measured only 10mm in diameter, while those that should be 10mm were only eight mm.
The diameter of the steel products, which standards have been compromised by local steel manufacturers, is not the only infraction that pushed SON into the panic mode. The agency also observed serious violations in the length of various units of steel products.
“The length of a unit of steel bar is supposed to be around 12mm, but after our enforcement exercise, we discovered that each unit of product in the market had lengths that were short by as much as 2mm,” Odumodu said.
The obviously worried former DG broke the news at a press conference in Lagos. He said apart from violation of standards in terms of physical properties like diameter and length, the manufacturers also failed to meet acceptable standards in the area of chemical properties such as carbon and manganese content. With regard to the products’ carbon content, which is an impurity, per unit product, the SON chief stated that most products in the market at the moment had in excess of 0.37 per cent. This, he said, violates the stipulated standards for iron and steel products coded as NIS 117 of 2004 and BS 4449 of 2005.
Manufacturers short-change government
Going by disclosures by the Standards monitoring/regulatory agency, the activities of the manufacturers of substandard iron and steel products have also left Federal and state governments holding the short end of the stick. The Nation learnt that the manufacturers totalling about 20 companies in the country are also defrauding and short-changing Federal and State Governments in terms of payment of adequate taxes and levies.
Hear Odumodu: “The kind of feedback we got from our survey showed that most of them never had invoices. We have a situation where people pay N200 million for a consignment without an invoice. They just say pay into a certain account; there is no invoice; there is no Value Added Tax (VAT). It became also obvious that they are also short-changing the Federal Government of Nigeria because if there are no documents to show the cost of the product as against other applicable taxes, it means that the Federal Government is being short-changed.”
For him, it was perhaps, the height of unpatriotic attitude. He recalled, for instance, that the action of the manufacturers came at a time the agency was working on getting government to introduce a backward integration policy in the sector similar to the one that turns the fortunes of the cement sector around, leading to almost 90 per cent of Nigeria’s cement requirements being met by local manufacturers.
His words: “Our plan was how we could work with them to ensure that government comes up with a policy to support made- in-Nigeria steel products. The next phase for us was how to lobby so that government could bring up a policy like we had for cement and others, because at that point we already had almost 90 per cent of the Nigeria’s cement requirements being met by local manufacturers and that was actually where we were.”
He, however, expressed regrets that towards the end of last year, SON’s monitoring started showing that there were challenges. “Apparently some of these challenges were based on the survival instincts on the part of the manufacturers, because we started observing that a number of issues were cropping up that showed that they were beginning to put in the market substandard steel products,” he alleged.
It is easy to see why SON is agonising over the development. Sometime in 2012, the agency celebrated the sanitisation of the re-enforcement bar market. SON insisted at that time that manufacturers should ensure that they had relevant equipment for chemical and other kinds of tests including having unique identification marks for all their products in the market.
According to the DG, the only challenge the agency had at that point was for the imported re-enforcement bars, which of course, it finally also brought on the same fold. “We also set up a task force to monitor them on monthly basis and things were looking up,” he added, pointing out that the first major alarm that things have started falling apart was around September 2015.
More building collapse looms
The preponderance of substandard steel products in the market has fuelled fears that more buildings may collapse across the country. “Most of the re-enforcement bars in the market today are substandard, and that is why we felt that it was important we alert Nigerians especially people within the building industry, construction, structural engineers and all those kind of people who are involved in this business,” Odumodu said.
It was not a false alarm. The former SON chief recalled, for instance, in June 2014, a 5-storey building that was meant to be a school for children came down in Onitsha, the commercial city of Anambra State, southeast Nigeria because of the use of substandard building materials.
The building, which was completed, collapsed before it was commissioned. It was meant to house about 400 children. Although no life was lost, he said “we would have actually had an accident that would have killed more children than a Boeing 747 coming down. So, that gives you an idea of how bad or how fatal the situation can become.”
The Nation learnt that part of the problem in ensuring standards in the steel industry stems from inability to create batching within the industry. Odumodu explained further: “If manufacturers made a product in the morning and another one in the evening, they cannot differentiate between the first one and the second one, because every code on the product is the same. That is unlike the food and pharmaceutical sector, for instance, where every batch is coded differently.”
This means that the regulatory agency relies on the batch manufacturing records within the factories. It also means that members of SON taskforce will have to go back to these factories to find out how many batches they have made, where they were sold to, and then see whether will be able to trace further.
However, this process, which is no doubt cumbersome, according to Odumodu, “draws issues about products manufacturing and recall procedure because in a lot of countries there are clearly defined recall procedures.” Besides, the agency’s has less than 1, 400 people, which make monitoring and enforcement in the industry difficult.We are not closing down any company
Remedial efforts in top gear
Despite the lack of products manufacturing and recall procedure in the country and the challenge of limited staff, SON says it is determined to clean the Aegean stable. Consequently, it has taken a number of steps to avert the impending danger posed by substandard steel product.
“We have decided on a number of actions to immediately reverse the situation. Effective from February 9, 2016, no sale of reinforcement bars can happen in Nigeria without verification scaling, which means that if a batch is normally supposed to weigh 40 tonnes, it must be weighed before it leaves the premises of the seller. If it is not weighed, those people who are dealers will become responsible for whatever violations that may have occurred,” Odumodu announced.
He added that SON staff will continue to measure the calibration status of the weighing equipment that are used in the factories and any company that is found with the intention of cheating the consumer will be sealed for a minimum of 90 days no matter what the reasons are. He said once the scale does not comply with the calibration status as required by law, the culprit will be punished.
With regard to carbon content, which actually affects the tensile strength, the DG said SON is now insisting that all furnaces that are not electric arc must be replaced within the next six months, because what manufacturers are currently using does not have the capacity to remove impurities. “So they must elevate their technology to the use of electric arc furnace or any other technology that is better,” he said.
According to industry experts, most of the irons currently selling in Nigeria come from scraps and scraps are known to have a way of being contaminated. If a manufacturer is using equipment that does not have the capacity to remove contaminants then sooner or later there will be errors, which could be fatal.
This is why SON is insisting that the electric arc furnace or any better technology must be effectively employed within the next six months. “If manufacturers require some assistance in ensuring that they are able to bring those equipments fast enough, we would assist”, SON volunteered.
Also, all iron and steel products must now carry clearly stated identity marks. This was sequel to the agency’s discovery that some products in the market either did not have identity marks or some of the marks were blurred, which makes if difficult to say a particular product is from A, B, C manufacturer.
“If your own mould, for any reason, has a challenge, stop manufacturing and correct it. We are also insisting that within six months, you must also state the diameter explicitly on the ribs of the irons besides carrying out chemical analysis on all batches and these records should be available for inspection of our compliance officers,” Odumodu said.
Stating that the message is for manufacturers, dealers, and retailers who constitute the three major levels within the steel industry value chain, he warned that anybody or company that fails to comply risked closure and prosecution.
