The body charged with regulating the foods, drug and cosmetics sector in Nigeria is the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC). In this interview with LEADERSHIP WEEKEND’s RUTH CHOJI, the agency’s Director-General, Dr. Paul B. Orhii highlights the challenges of policing the drug market and what is being done to rid the Nigerian market of fake and adulterated drugs. Excerpts: The body charged with regulating the foods, drug and cosmetics sector in Nigeria is the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC). In this interview with LEADERSHIP WEEKEND’s RUTH CHOJI, the agency’s Director-General, Dr. Paul B. Orhii highlights the challenges of policing the drug market and what is being done to rid the Nigerian market of fake and adulterated drugs. Excerpts:
Has NAFDAC reduced the influx of fake drugs into the country?
We have been able to reduce the import and sale of fake drugs from one point sixteen percent to about five percent in the big cities. In the rural areas, it is still higher, but we are combing all the states. So far we have visited about twenty-three states with the Thru Scan to check the quality of medicines there. We cannot say that we have stamped out fake medicine but we have given them a good fight. This is especially so when you consider the fact that, globally the incidence of fake drugs is worsening. With the crackdown on cocaine dealers, the drugs baron has turned their business into the less risky and more profitable fake medicine business.
According to the estimate by the World Customs Organization, fake medicine constitute about seventy-five to two hundred billion-dollar business. This has made the business to become more sophisticated, more militarised and more globalised. Even in a system like the US not known to have fake medicines, they are now battling with the incidence of fake drugs. In Europe where they never had such issues, recently a fake drug cartel was smashed. Now they are coming to us to help them since we have managed to reduce our own to the lowest level.
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Given the nature of your brief, how do you manage the local and rural areas where the use of fake drugs is high?
It is worse in the rural areas. But we have adopted measures which are really working. Remember the cases of malaria drugs that was high, but we have managed to reduce it. You know that anti-malaria drugs are the most abused because malaria is endemic in our system. It is more difficult in the rural areas because of lack of awareness. In the rural area, you can show somebody two medicines and tell him that, ‘this one is fake, but I will sell it for five Naira, this one is original but it cost ten naira.’ They will tell you to give them the fake one for five naira.
To them, they look exactly the same, because they have been packaged to look the same. They tend to believe that the fake medicine dealers are their saviours because the medicine would have been too expensive for them. So in that kind of culture, massive enlightenment campaigning is required. We have teamed up with all the local government councils by recruiting all the 774 chairmen. We invited all of them to a stake-holders meeting here and we requested that they set up a NAFDAC desk in the entire secretariat to police the illegal advisement of illegal herbal medicine and drug hawking. Most of the states have responded positively.
We have also teamed up with the traditional rulers who are on the ground in rural areas to help us educate their people about fake medicines. We are partnering with the youth. We have a NAFDAC consumer safety club where we hold competitions all over the country, educating the youths, trying to catch them young.
We are beginning to reap rewards; we have NAFDAC and ‘Your Health’ program on NTA, AIT and channels TV too. We also have a radio program, the NAFDAC number and FRCN is airing it all over the country. People call us from remote parts of the country to give us tips on some of the fake drugs. We also introduced the text message system that has really boosted the fight against counterfeit medicine, because more than eighty million Nigeria are using cell phones and they are conversant with text messages.
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Nigeria still imports drugs despite the availability of pharmacists and experts in this field. What is your take on this?
First and foremost, we import about seventy percent of essential medicines into this country. If you consider the fact that our borders are vast and porous and the population of 150 million, it is possible for people bring in fake medicines and because Nigeria has a very huge market for drugs and people can consume anything they see. I would also say that, maybe the investment in the pharmaceutical companies have not been enough. Right now, we do not have a single company that has WHO pre-qualification certificate. For any country to start manufacturing and exporting drugs, you need to have that permission. Huge markets like India, China have factories that are pre-qualified.
Most medicines that are bought by donors for Nigeria are brought from those countries. Recently, we were being given anti-malaria drugs and the cost is going to be less than a hundred naira per packet.
The local manufacturer cannot afford that cost. So you are bringing a pre-qualified company that can produce these drugs and sell them at this amount. It looks like a kind gesture, but at the same time, it goes to kill our manufacturing companies. We have become perpetually dependent on import. Right now we cannot compete with them, price wise and all that. Even when we have quality that is close to that, they will beat us with the price.
When I look at it, I imagine the rice situation. When I was growing up as a Tiv man the ability by a woman to work on rice farm was a precondition for marrying her. As it were, if the woman could not work on the farm, the family would not allow the man to go ahead with the marriage. This is because economically she is not viable. We used to produce rice as a major cash crop.
Then suddenly, the Americans introduced Uncle Ben’s rice. It was so nice, easy to cook and so on. They had a good marketing strategy; the rice was sold in big bags and also small ones for ten-ten kobo, so that even students could afford it. Everybody in Nigeria could afford Uncle Ben’s rice. It became the staple in every house, and then more importantly our local rice always has sand inside.
We have now become so hooked on to Uncle Ben’s rice that Nigerians now import it. It even became an item of sanctions. If Nigeria did not do very well at the international arena, US could say ‘well since you did this, no rice will be sold to you for so-so time’ and Nigeria will start revolting here because that is the only food they knew. This year alone, the Central Bank has reported that Nigerians imported rice worth one hundred and fifty-six billion naira. This is money that if injected into our system would have provided lots of jobs. So you can see that after killing our rice industries, we now import rice into the country. It is the same thing happening in the drug industry. These people are giving us cheap drugs; we have become dependent on them. It looks like a good gesture but we will continue to depend on these drugs and kill our drug industries.
Most of the fake drugs are imported from Asian countries. What is NAFDAC doing about this?
We have tried to stop them at source. In China, we got the Chinese authorities to sentence six of their own citizens to death for a consignment that was brought to Nigeria. In India, we have had a success story there too; we worked with their parliament and they passed a law that made it criminal offence, punishable by life time jail for anyone caught exporting fake drugs to Nigeria. So India is now policing their own citizens.
They have introduced a reward system in their High Commission here in Nigeria whereby tips that would lead to the discovery of fake drugs originating from India would attract three hundred thousand Naira reward and the identity of the person protected from harm.?
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Experts on environmental health have been complaining about the way drugs are burnt by NAFDAC. A re there plans to modernise such operations?
We have been making diligent efforts to acquire incinerators to make it healthy. But they are very expensive; we require billions of Naira to do that. Right now we are working with the ecological fund to help us acquire modern incinerators. But even then we go to the bush to burn the drugs so that there will be minimal effect. We have been doing our best while waiting for these incinerators to come in.
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Are you confident that Nigeria can meet up with its health challenges in 2015?
The world cannot wait for Nigeria. The world is advancing and people are moving on. I am not sure I can tell you that we can meet up with the rest of the world. The big 20 countries like America, China, Japan and rest invest heavily in their health sectors. If you look at the US health sector, the size of their staff alone is something else. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) staff of America, in their Department of Statistics, in their drugs section alone, they have 130 statisticians with PhD. I don’t have a single one here. There they are divided into professional sections: the Drug Section, Food Section and the Medical Section. My whole staff in the planning and statistic do not have a doctorate or even a Master’s degree in statistics. Until recently we had only six staff in that section covering a 150 million Nigerians. So if you look at that kind of staffing and you say we will meet up by 2015, is it possible?
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Recently, there were reports that government wanted to withdraw some agencies including??? NAFDAC from the ports. What does NAFDAC do at the ports?
That is a complex issue. It is a big picture and we as an agency represent a tiny dot on that picture. But the presidency is looking at the bigger picture, the whole nation. It is not for me to sit here and guess what will happen if NAFDAC is pulled out of the ports. We will wait until it is implemented and then see how it goes from there. Government is a continuous thing.
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What are the challenges you are facing as the D-G of NAFDAC?
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Funding is top on the list. NAFDAC is grossly underfunded. Let me give you an example; in Kano State, there are forty four local government areas. If we want to cover Kano State adequately, knowing that it is close to the border of Niger Republic, we have a lot of fake products trying to come in through there. If we want to adequately monitor the state, then we should have a NAFDAC presence in every local government area. Right now we have only one office in Kano and that office has less than forty staff including typists and others and then we have two vehicles. One is an old Peugeot vehicle that breaks down frequently. So the challenges are enormous. I understand that it is not only NAFDAC. All the other agencies are facing the same thing. Government must try to balance all this things we are trying to manage.
Kano State needs to have about two hundred staff and the same thing in Lagos. Our inspectorate has no vehicle to go out on inspection. I am trying to refurbish an uncomplicated house we bought. Before then they were living in some porter cabin that were bought in 2004. Some of them have been rat infested, they are not habitable. We had to refurbish those cabins. Closely related to funding is staffing.
For example this Thru Scan is being used in the US to check the quality of drugs by top pharmaceuticals company. As a regulatory agency, we are the first in the world to deploy it. Now other countries in the world like Canada and other countries have begun to buy that scan too. But how many do we have? We don’t have up to ten. Ideally we would have needed up to ten so that every good pharmacy will be able to check the medicine before they stock them. Sometime they, the pharmacists don’t know that the medicines are fake, because they look so genuine.
That is why when we go to a pharmacy and find fake medicine, we don’t not just arrest them immediately, we require them to tell us where they bought it and we take the receipt and trace the origin, we have intercepted a medicine that have a hologram while the real medicine doesn’t have a hologram to protect it, you know that hologram are meant to protect? the drugs, so these fake dealers put their hologram, thinking the real owners will invert a hologram in the future, and they were deceiving? patience into? thinking that their own was the genuine one while their own was the fake.
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There were allegations recently that NAFDAC was doing underground recruitment here?
To be employed in NAFDAC, we require that you must have the appropriate qualifications. That is because of the kind of product we regulate; we need food and science technologists. We need people with bio-chemistry; we need chemistry graduates who can work in our laboratory. We need microbiologists; we also need statisticians, people who will help us look at the policies we are carrying out and tell us how they are impacting on our activities.
We need a few lawyers in administration and so on. We publicly announced in June that we are employing. We needed only three hundred people, but we got 54,000 applications. Most of them were qualified and it was a big task to invite 10, 000 for interview. Now I have 10,000 highly qualified people and I am now sitting here trying to get just three hundred out of them because we publicly advertised.