The National Bureau of Standards has given traders in Juba three months to stop using local weighing methods for selling commodities in the market.

Businessmen in the town have been using local scales like cups and buckets to measure food items.

The Chief Executive Director of the Bureau of standards, Mary Gordon, has directed all traders to start using standard weighing scales, which she says are available at the bureau’s office.

“We discover that there was a lot of cheating to our citizens and we are sorry really because of that, but because of the situation, we are in now, we were not able to get the instruments that are actually appropriate for this work that we were supposed to do,” she said.

Mary Gordon says an awareness campaign to the traders is going on to highlight the benefit of using standard measurements.

“This work is going on until the end of the year and next year because is going to take us a while to remove all this buckets and cups and unauthorized instruments in the markets but it is going to be done,” she explained.

Ms. Gordon says the campaign will also be conducted in others states.

She warned that those who do not follow the order to use standard scales will be fined between 5 to 10,000 pounds or be banned from trading.