NOTHING in, of, and from Onitsha comes in a small package. In many respects that town located on the fringe of Anambra state in the Igbo nation has a reputation for being big, bad and ugly. Interestingly, some who live there will not exchange it for anywhere else in this country, and probably in the world. Conversely, there are some Nigerians including the Igbo who will never be caught dead living in Onitsha irrespective of any incentives that could be on the table to lure them. [By the way, Nigeria’s political gadfly and the conscience of the country, Mr. Peter Obi, lives there]. For some travellers, passing through Onitsha whilst on a journey is a prospect that paralyzes their thoughts, makes their heart beats skip, and cripples their body. Their fear is palpable. But there’s no small measures for the majority of the people who live and work in that sprawling settlement on the banks of the River Niger. The houses in Onitsha are big and sometimes bogus [I really mean bogus as in false]. The people are boisterous, boastful, and loud. Its crowd is maddening and frightening. When it produces an armed robber, the terror of the felon is etched for life in a victim’s memory. Ironically, two of our country’s urbane personages live in Onitsha – Peter Obi as I said earlier, and the town’s traditional ruler, Obi of Onitsha, Igwe Ugochukwu Achebe, a former executive of the oil giant Shell Petroleum Development Company [SPDC] of Nigeria.
Onitsha used to be described as the biggest market in Africa. I was no longer sure of this status at the point of writing this on Sunday. So I asked Meta AI if Onitsha was still the largest market in West Africa? It said: “Onitsha Main Market is indeed considered one of the largest markets in West Africa and even Africa as a whole. Located in Onitsha, Anambra state, Nigeria, it’s a commercial powerhouse that attracts merchants from the ECOWAS sub-region, including Accra [Ghana], Abidjan [Côte d’Ivoire], Duala [Cameroon], Niamey [Niger Republic], and Cotonou [Republic of Benin]. The market’s vast size and volume of goods have earned it recognition as the largest market in Africa…” It will be no hyperbole to say that you can get anything and everything in Onitsha because the town’s markets have grown beyond specific places and locations. Every building and every structure and every shanty and every shed and every road and every park [for vehicles and leisure seekers] in Onitsha has become a buzzing marketplace for jewelry and clothing, household and industrial equipment; foodstuffs and sundry articles; timber and building materials; and, electrical and motor spare parts; as well as, medicines and health-related products in “Ogbo Ogwu” or depot for pharmaceuticals. And it is this last place – ogbo ogwu – that’s of immense interest to us given what has been happening there since the beginning of this year.
On February 9, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control [NAFDAC] officers raided the ‘ogbo ogwu’ section of the Main Market in Onitsha, where they claimed to have uncovered 10 trucks of fake drugs with a market value in excess of N1 trillion. The team was led by the agency’s south east zone director, Martins Iluyomade. That arm of the market was subsequently shut down about a week later while the alleged fake drugs were reportedly destroyed at a dump site in Awka, the Anambra state capital. For the following three months NAFDAC kept the market shut for it [NAFDAC] and its personnel to negotiate ransom payments by all the traders in ogbo ogwu. Estimates put the number of affected shops in ogbo ogwu at anywhere between 1000 and 3000. In our country we have between seven to 10 dependents for every bread winner. So if we multiply three thousand shop owners by 10 dependents, we will have about 30,000 hapless citizens who were being subjected to punishment by NAFDAC. The agency ignored all pleas to do the right thing in its regulatory functions. As the shut down lingered the traders claimed that the food and drugs control agency asked each shop owner to pay N700,000 to a designated Central Bank account for their shops to be allowed to reopen. Some traders allegedly paid the ransom money, others went to court while the market remained shut.
As the impasse continued the stories kept unravelling. NAFDAC said that in addition to fake and adulterated drugs, the storage conditions in that market did not meet acceptable standards. And that reasonable fees to lift the siege on the market were imposed but that they were nowhere close to the figures being bandied by the traders. On their part the traders showed social media influencers what they claimed was evidence of the payments of an alleged N700,000 each into a CBN account with the name NAFDAC Project. The battle raged in both the court of law and the court of public opinion. While it lasted, the affected people, their businesses and dependents suffered in this cruel Tinubu economy. Now let’s get it right. The issue of fake and adulterated drugs is real and pervasive in Nigeria. The former head of NAFDAC, the much beloved Dora Akunyili, almost paid with her life while she battled the merchants of death. Yes, that’s what they are – merchants of death. They are not selling medicines, they are selling poison and killing people including their own. Those who sell fake and adulterated drugs deserve neither respite nor mercy. They are evil who have no qualms with making and living off blood money. They should not be spared when caught. They should be made to suffer to the fullest extent of the laws.
But that does not appear to be what the NAFDAC was doing in the ‘ogbo ogwu’ case. By shutting down the whole market the agency gave the impression that all the traders in the market were involved in the perfidy. But it could not establish it. We are not acquainted with any parts of the laws of Nigeria that prescribed collective punishment for any alleged crime. And that was what NAFDAC did in ogbo ogwu for three months – punishing the alleged guilty merchants of death along with the innocent business people. That, to us, is problematic, unacceptable, and unjust. Among others, collective punishment leads to injustice, resentment and suspicion of the motives of government agencies, demoralisation of those who walk the straight and narrow path, and lack of accountability by the real criminals and outlaws. Blanket punishment makes it attractive and profitable for all the traders in ogbo ogwu in Onitsha to join the bandwagon of evil doers and the merchants of death. The right and sensible approach would have been to identify those responsible in all the medicine markets that were raided in Onitsha and Lagos, and hold them accountable. The likely argument would be financially costly, painstaking and inconvenient cannot justify collective punishment.
Crime prevention is cheaper than raiding the hideouts of criminals, arresting and detaining them. But in our country there’s little evidence, if any, of collaboration and liaison between agencies with overlapping functions. It’s a known fact that some fake, substandard and adulterated medicines are compounded in Nigeria by unconscionable business people, but the truth is that much of such drugs are imported into the country through formal and informal routes. In both routes from where the deadly merchandise comes into the country, the relevant officers with the mandate to stop the flow are at best incompetent, and at worst collaborators with the merchants of death. They are partakers and beneficiaries of blood money. There’s another reason why the flow of killer drugs into Nigeria seems unstoppable. Relevant government agencies are under pressure to become profit centres. So, many public agencies have become revenue generating outposts to the detriment of their core mandates. For instance, the Nigerian Customs Service is measured for performance by the billions or trillions of Naira it brings to the coffers of the federal government than its primary mandate of ensuring national security and trade facilitation between Nigeria and other countries. The same yardstick applies to the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board [JAMB], an examination body which is now better known for remitting billions of Naira to the federal government. JAMB does not think that it is unconscionable to charge pauperized parents huge examination fees every year and tax candidates, only to remit the excess money to a notoriously profligate government. JAMB is not alone. If other examination bodies are not making returns to the government, it will only be because their leaders are stealing the excess funds as was the case with JAMB under previous registrars or heads. Many things are going wrong in the country but our rulers are not really bothered. They are incapable of enlightened self interest as obtains with the ruling elite in some other climes.