Hundreds of market women took to the streets on Thursday to protest moves by Osun state government to introduce standardized weighing scale.

The market women embarked on the protest from the popular Igbona market and trekked to the Ola-Iya junction where they obstructed traffic to draw attention of the people to their grievance against the use of weighing scale which is also known as Osunwon Omoluabi.

The protesters later proceeded to the Osun State House of Assembly and the office of the governor at the state secretariat to present their request to jettison scales.

The traders said the weighing scale was imposed on them by the state government and vowed to resist use of the weighing scales.

During the inauguration of the weighing scale on June 2016 at the Nelson Mandela Freedom Park in Osogbo, the state governor, Mr Rauf Aregbesola said his policy on standardised scales was backed by the law.

The governor said the weights and measures constituted item 63 on the Exclusive Legislatives list of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and that it is the best practice to guide against fraud and cheating in the markets.

Task force and compliance officials from the ministry of commerce and industry have been going to markets in the state to monitor the level of compliance and to sell the new weighing scales to traders and ensure that they use it.

But the traders said they wouldn’t want to use the weighing scales and urged the state government to reverse its policy.

One of the protesters who preferred anonymity said the traders preferred traditional measurement scale popularly known as Kongo or Kobiowu.

She stated that the traders were buying the products with the traditional measurement from the farmers at the villages and that selling the product with use of the standardised weighing scale would be a contradiction.

Source: Dailytrust