The Director General, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, has disclosed the agency’s target to reduce the nation’s drug importation from the current 70% to 30% by 2025.
Prof. Adeyeye in a chat with newsmen in Lagos on Wednesday said the agency is already working towards the goal, stressing that the goal could only be achieved by drastic increase in local manufacturing of drugs, pointing that an increase in local drug manufacturing would help to a large extent in curbing the prevalence of substandard drugs and ensure drug security in the country.
The DG noted that the agency is using multifaceted approaches to curb substandard and falsified medicine in the country, noting that if a country is over-dependent on importation of medicine, such country will get substandard drugs and if not for COVID-19, Nigeria wouldn’t have woken up from its slumber as a country.
The NAFDAC DG said “When I started my tenure, local manufacturing of medicine became my focus because when you increase local manufacturing you are not just giving more jobs or increasing the GDP. Most, importantly, you are safeguarding the health of the nation because if somebody is falsifying something on Ota, for example, we can get there within one hour and something like that had happened before.
“So, we want to change the 70 per cent importation of drugs into the country to 30 per cent by 2025, so that as a nation we can say we have drug security because we don’t have that now. A country that is not drug secured is not secured in other facets”.
“We have read our riot act to drugs manufacturers who bring their drugs to the country if they want to be friends in trade with Nigeria. If they want to be friends with us, they should do what we want and not send what will kill our people and that is why we have tightened shipment of drugs into the country.
“We have been to China and India and now we deal with the lab directly not the agents like what it used to be before,” he said.
