The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has said that over 50 percent of certificates of pharmaceutical products imported into Nigeria are fake.
Director-general of NAFDAC, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, who disclosed this at the stakeholders’ engagement meeting with regulators, policymakers, and law enforcement agencies on Monday in Abuja, said the meeting was aimed at ensuring that medical products in circulation are of the right quality, safe, and efficacious.
The DG expressed worry while describing substandard and falsified products as threat to safe and affordable medicines in Nigeria and Africa.
She said “Most of our medicines come from South East Asia and we belong to the member states too. We have a scheme where before medicines that were approved leave that part of the world, we do pre-shipment testing, and that comes with CPP to assure us of quality, but that is not the case, because through our scheme we have been able to stop over 140 products that were approved from coming.
“We found out that more than 50 percent of the CPPs that come into our country are fake. Part of the responsibility is our people that go to China or India and we are going to deal with it. It’s a Member States issue, and we are going to deal with it.
“We are very stringent than ever and there is no cutting of corners, we have blacklisted many companies, we have sanctioned them because we want people to respect our people. Trade is a mutual agreement and if that agreement is harming one part of the agreement, we will stop it. If a company is suspected to be compromising, in two hours we will be there, and we will shut the company down.”
