The National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control, NAFDAC has stated that it is seeking to reduce drug importation from 70% to 30% by 2025.
Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, Director-General of NAFDAC, told the News Agency of Nigeria on Wednesday in Lagos that this might be accomplished through expanded local medicine manufacture.
According to Adeyeye, growing local medicine manufacture would assist to reduce the prevalence of substandard drugs and ensure drug security in the country.
She stated, We are using a broad strategy to combating substandard and fraudulent medicine in the country.
If a country is overly reliant on medical imports, that country will receive poor drugs, and if it hadn’t been for COVID-19, we would not have awoken from our slumber as a country.
When I began my tenure, local production of medication became my goal since growing local manufacturing does more than only create jobs or raise GDP.
Most importantly, you are protecting the nation’s health because if someone is misrepresenting something on Ota, for example, we can come there in an hour and something similar has happened previously.
So, by 2025, we want to reduce the country’s drug importation from 70% to 30%, so that as a nation, we can say we have drug security, which we don’t have presently.
A country that is not drug-free is not secure in any other way.
The DG also stated that the agency had increased its grip on drug imports into the country.
We have read the riot book to drug makers that bring their products into the country if they wish to trade with Nigeria.
If they want to be our friends, they should do what we want and not bring what will kill our people, which is why we have tightened drug shipment into the country.
We’ve travelled to China and India, and now we deal directly with the lab rather than the agents as we used to, Adeyeye explained.
