Follow Us on Google
By Henry Uche
The National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) said it had achieved unprecedented feats in the past four years, from organizational processes to personnel upgrade.
Marking her fourth year in office, the Director General, Mojisola Adeyeye, revealed that, on assumption in office (Nov 2017) she met a N3.2bn debt, but such was totally cleared as at November 20, 2018.
According to her, NAFDAC has upgraded its six zonal offices including the FCT. Her words: “We have met the 53 recommendations requested by World Health Organisation (WHO) necessary for us to operate maximally in line with International standards.
“Under my leadership, Quality Management System (QMS) has been entrenched in the Agency with all our processes procedure driven. The Agency was ISO 9001:2015 Certified in June 2019. NAFDAC has been received recertification in 2020 and 2021.
“We discovered and recovered over N106m which was erroneously credited to other MDA in 2015, and had maintained all books of accounting, our staff welfare/conducive work environment, training /education and logistics were top priorities.”
Adeyeye also revealed that her administration recovered 533 million naira evaded administrative charges (2014 to 2017) from stakeholders by the ports inspection directorate, and made payment of N14,246,499.00 Severance Allowance for the first time in the history of the Agency to the staff who retired from NAFDAC between July and September 2018.
“We planned to construct more offices in Kaduna, Edo and other States as captured in 2022 budget. We are in collaboration with University of Abuja and others on research and development for critical health challenges.”
She added that NAFDAC has put a premium on local manufacturing of regulated products to ensure that Nigeria would have drug security and turn the tide from 70 per cent imports to about 30 per cent imports by year 2025, to ward off substandard and falsified products.
“NAFDAC has placed emphasis on local herbal medicines by stepping down approval of imported herbal medicines that have equivalence in Nigeria. This is to create a renaissance of our herbal medicines and mitigate possible falsification and counterfeiting.
“We have made series of arrests, seizure and destruction of substandard products as well as prosecutions. Soon Nigeria will be manufacturing her own vaccines once WHO visits the Agency physically and declares the Agency ML3. We are working toward ML4 that will enable products approved by NAFDAC to be easily trade continentally and globally,” she affirmed.
