Why anti-quackery legislations must be stricter in safety business —Adejola, CEO, Surveillance Fire Ltd

In this interview by Akin Adewakun, Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Surveillance Fire Ltd, Jumade Adejola, talks about safety business in Nigeria, including the activities of quacks in the business and why there is need for stronger legislations to put them in check.

My reasons for going into safety business

What has brought me to this profession is the passion for safety of lives and property. The first place I worked, then, after my education, was a fire engineering company. That was where I developed passion for the job. The company has been around since 1998, though it was registered as an enterprise in 2001. By 2005,  it became a limited liability company. We have tried our best in this industry because when we started we believe that the way people were doing the business, it’s like they didn’t really know what the business was all about. Though  I give credit to my former boss, Chief Banjoko,  then President of the Fire Association, because he always clamoured for quality, whenever fire installation was being discussed. It was from him I knew that whatever was worth doing at all should be done well. That is why from day one, we decided that we would not compromise on quality. When you look at this environment, you discover that the products here are not just quality products, but approved ones by the relevant approval bodies. This is simply due to the fact that anything that has to do with life and property, mistakes are not accepted.

Why we patronise foreign brands only

We don’t shop around, locally, for products because we are not too sure of their quality. We bring in our products from UK, USA, Dubai, Malaysia and Singapore.  It is borne out of our  commitment to  excellence. We always ensure that the products that we select are approved products and of a high quality. We need to be very careful with the product that we select. But what we are trying to do now is to start up our assembly plant. The issue is that this would have started since. Some  of our OEMs (Orignial Equipment Manufacturers) have even come here,  because  we are not happy importing all our products from abroad. Some of them have come to Lagos,  visited the free zone, and what they want to do is to put their costs together and see if they can start the complete knocked down assembly here. We have been telling them to come and start doing this here, and they are ready to come. But the irony of the whole thing is that when they came, they discovered that the cost of doing that was  much higher than what doing there, just because of power. Some of these machines are heavy duty ones, expected to be well powered. But where is the power? So for them to be on ground, we must have a functional power system. Without that, we will continue to import. You know in this business of safety, there is zero tolerance for error. That is why we have never recorded any accident in our client place. Yes, there are so many fire companies out there, but we are not competing with any of them because they are not doing what we are doing, in terms of service delivery and product selection.

Reasons Individuals and, corporate organisations must change their attitude to safety

It is only in this part of the world that you will see people riding exotic cars without fire extinguisher. Interestingly, the reason is very simple, everybody believes that fire incident can only happen to somebody else, not them. But they’ve forgotten that they are also somebody to somebody. If you are saying God forbid, that can only happen to somebody else, don’t forget that somebody is also saying such prayers somewhere else. The first thing we need to do is to clear that ignorance that we have as a people. Besides, we have safety laws, so many safety codes, but implementation has always been the issue.

How to differentiate fake safety products from the original

There is nothing anybody can do without government regulation. The average human being does not feel like obeying the law. But he does it all the same because of its consequence. If there are no consequences for an action, nobody will obey the law. We simply need strict regulation to discourage the people that are bringing in fake products. It is an aberration for NAFDAC, SON to start going from one store to the other, looking  for fake products without asking themselves how such products got there in the first place. How did they come out of the port in the first place?  We have qualified engineers in this country, who can identify fake products from real ones and we have laboratories, too, where such products can be tested. Have we been making using of all these? If yes, why allow the product into the market, after discovering it is fake? People should begin to realise that whenever you compromise safety standards, lives and properties are being compromised. The individuals too should try to identify those that sell genuine safety products. For instance, I’m shocked when I see people selling extinguishers in the traffic. Those are bombshell. They are ordinary flit. Those things can not put out fire. We need to understand that there are standards, as far as the industry is concerned. So the onus is on the individual to identify the companies that supply the standard products and services. We have been doing some advocacy in this regard. We are actually planning to launch out to let people understand some of these things. Besides there is the need to ensure that government regulations are properly complied with, through constant monitoring.

Quackery remains the number one challenge to the business

We have a lot of quacks. In fact their activities pose serious challenge to the business. Let me give you an instance. There is a company that is called NAFCO, that is Dubai-based, which we represent here. The company is known for quality products. Do you know that some Nigerians, who do not even have any relationship at all with the company, went ahead and registered the name NAFCO Nigeria Lrd, here, just because we have created so much awareness on the desirability of the NAFCO brands. And what do they now do? They’ll go and bring some substandard products from China and start selling here, leveraging that name. So what can we do, except a proper regulation? Only the intervention of regulatory bodies can flush out quacks in our industry. There should be a stricter regulation against this menace because of the peculiarity of the business. For instance, it is a business that does not give any room for error,  the more reasons the regulations should be stricter.

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Our survival strategies despite forex squeeze

Since we started, we have never benefitted from the CBN forex policy. Never. This organisation has never borrowed a single penny from the bank, since inception, and we have our reasons for doing that. We can not cope with the interest rates charged by banks. The way we’ve been financing our businesses is just to plough back our profits to those businesses. Therefore most of our exportations have always been through transfers. When you go through the banks, they are never sincere when it comes to  foreign exchange. So how others do it with them, I don’t  know. I remember the one we did sometimes ago, when we were looking for dollars at all cost. It is called  issuance money. Do you know that up till now I’m still paying charges, on it, after I thought I had paid all the charges? So it’s very difficult to get involved with banks and succeed. Majority of them are my clients, but I can’t borrow money from them. So talking about forex, we’ve never benefitted from CBN. What we do is just to change the little money that we have, send it to our client over there and get our products. We don’t want to be too big and then put ourselves in trouble.

Businesses, especially manufacturing industry should be more safety conscious

It is unfortunate that most of the operators are not pre-emptive when it comes to the issue of safety, especially fire in  manufacturing plants. This is because most of the manufacturing companies that we have here are run by foreigners. Unfortunately, because our regulatory agencies don’t visit the factories to see for themselves, they would have sanctioned most of them. When there is fire and there is no safety equipment, it is like endangering the lives of the people working there. Look at what happened in Ikorodu the last time.  What normally cause fire in some of these  manufacturing plants is due to lack of equipment, lack of maintenance of those equipment and no proper supervision by the regulatory authorities. If those things are addressed, fire incidents in these place will be reduced or totally their bearest minimum.

Relationship between safety business and insurance

I believe  it should be cordial. My only advice is that insurance companies should encourage their clients  to have fire equipment in their buildings. It is better for them to ensure that the building is protected, and then insure, than to just insure without any fire safety precautions.  Businesses should  think safety first, before thinking about the money they are  going to make from clients.