The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has said that cabals at the nation’s seaports are behind the influx of fake and substandard drugs into the country.
NAFDAC Director-General, Mojisola Adeyeye, who said this on Thursday while speaking before the House of Representatives Committee on Healthcare Services, said, “Let us look at our porous borders, we are surrounded by six countries and there is no guard in terms of regulation of the border.
“From 2011 to May 2016, NAFDAC was removed from the ports. We are supposed to be controlling and regulating what is imported or exported; seven years and cabals were formed.
“We cannot undo the cabals overnight and this is why it has been extremely challenging in the last three and a half years. The federal task force is domiciled in NAFDAC and we are putting a lot of monies on enforcement.
“We went straight into the heart of the problem which is China and India. Before, there were loopholes in terms of testing products that come into our country.
“We have pegged that and decreased significantly the number of fake products coming into the country, over 95 percent of products we import are from China and India.
“We read them the riot act and we have gotten so much success in terms of things coming in. However, we still have a lot of work to do, a regulatory agency has to use tools, it is vehicles that we will use to run after drug smugglers.”
Adeyeye said the agency needs more personnel at the borders to curb the importation of fake drugs into the country.