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After watching a recent press conference by the Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, I couldn’t help but nostalgically recall the Agency and its most effective leader in history, Prof. Dora Akunyili. It seems to me that the agency died when her service there ended. In that press conference, I saw a woman who confessed she had already retired from active service in the United States of America (USA), yet was handed an agency strategic to the health and well-being of Nigerians to oversee. Instead of taking the war against fake and counterfeit foods to the markets and warehouses, she said that she has been too busy paying off debts and tackling institutional decay, including collapsed laboratories, to effectively tackle the menace of fake drugs and counterfeit foods in Nigerian markets.
She forgot that every Nigerian household has, at some point, reached for a medicine or a meal and wondered whether it was what the label claimed. That flicker of doubt, whether over an antimalarial bought from a roadside chemist, a bottle of vegetable oil or a tin of infant formula, is the clearest verdict the public has passed on NAFDAC. That agency exists to guarantee that what Nigerians swallow, and what they feed their children, is safe. Three decades after its creation, that guarantee has collapsed into a gamble. And as the gamble grows more dangerous, an unlikely emotion has taken hold across the country. It is nostalgia for the years when Akunyili led the agency and made counterfeiters afraid.
Evidence of what Nigerians are now subjected to is not difficult to unearth. Open-air markets in Onitsha, Lagos, Kano and Aba continue to move substandard and falsified medicines in volumes that would embarrass any serious regulator. Counterfeit antimalarials, antibiotics and analgesics circulate freely, some containing no active ingredient, others too little to cure, and still others laced with substances never meant for human consumption. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that roughly one in ten medical products in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified. In Nigeria, where informal distribution networks dwarf the formal pharma sector, the figure could be lower. Public expectation is that this reality would be treated as a national emergency. But with Adeyeye’s NAFDAC, the debts are more important.
What Nigerians see in their markets includes adulterated palm oil, diluted honey, unregistered sachet water, expired goods relabelled with fresh dates, and counterfeit seasonings. These sit comfortably and undisguised beside genuine products on the same shelves, and at prices that compete with the genuine products. For people chastised by government policy-induced poverty, low-income prices are not just a trap but a way out. Poverty and counterfeiting feed each other, and a NAFDAC that is visibly absent from the market leaves the poor to bear the whole cost, including the impact on their family health and pocket.
NAFDAC was established by Decree No. 15 of 1993 with a mandate that is simple and plain. It was to regulate and control the manufacture, importation, exportation, advertisement, distribution, sale and use of food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices, packaged water and chemicals. Its task includes registration, inspection, laboratory testing, post-market surveillance and prosecution where necessary. That mandate hands NAFDAC a statutory duty that is funded by the taxpayer and by the fees of the very industries it is mandated to police. Therefore, Nigerians will always rank the agency not by the number of press statements it issues or how much debt it has paid off, but by the number of dangerous products it removes from circulation and also by the number of counterfeiters it showed the way to jail.
Besides, the release of videos of raids on fake alcoholic beverage factories, parades of seized cartons of fake products before the cameras, and warnings about a named product have not been enough to achieve anything because within weeks the same goods reappear in the same markets and the raids continue like a cycle. Seizures are announced, but convictions are rarely seen. Where penalties are announced, they are a slap on the wrist, and the financiers and importers behind the counterfeit trade seldom face the courts. A counterfeiter who calculates that arrest is unlikely, and punishment is mild will conclude, rationally, that fraud pays courtesy of NAFDAC’s dying efficiency.
The problem, as I see it, is not one of resources. Yes, resources may be scarce, but what NAFDAC seems to be facing is a problem of will and of public confidence. Nigerians see goods of questionable origin clear the hurdles at ports and reach the supermarket shelves and market stalls. That leaves them with suspicion that a registration number can be obtained by those who know where to knock. This suspicion kills public confidence in NADFAC and makes everyone believe that its backdoor is fully open to counterfeit merchants.
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What NADAFC knows, but has failed to address, is that fake drugs do not merely fail to heal. They prolong illness, encourage drug resistance, kill by instalments, and bury children whose parents did everything right. Every fake antimalarial is a child who may not recover, and every counterfeit antibiotic is a small gift to resistant infection. These are gradual funerals. And this is why many Nigerians are frightened.
And out of this fear comes the remembrance of the standard set by Prof. Akunyili, who became Director-General in 2001. Under her, the agency inherited a market in which, by its own estimate, roughly four in ten drugs were fake or substandard. She did not respond with conferences and debt repayments. She went to the markets. She led raids on the notorious distribution hubs of Onitsha and Lagos. She confronted traders who had operated for decades and beyond the reach of the law, and treated counterfeiting not as a regulatory infraction but as a crime against life.
She received threats and survived an assassination attempt in 2003. But she refused to retreat. Instead, she tightened product registration, sharpened vigilance at the borders and launched a public campaign that turned ordinary citizens into witnesses. By NAFDAC’s own figures, the proportion of fake and substandard drugs fell from about 41 per cent to below 17 per cent by the middle of the decade. Whatever the debates about methodology, few would deny that the country felt the difference and, for the first time in a generation, Nigerians believed that someone at NAFDAC was on their side. Her tenure earned her honours at home and abroad, and it demonstrated that a public institution in Nigeria can be made to work by a leader who is honest, fearless and personally invested in its mission. Akunyili set a standard which her successors have serially failed to match.
The standards she set explain the yearning now visible across the country. It shows itself in newspaper columns, on radio call-in programmes and in social media threads. Whenever a fresh scandal breaks, the response is almost the same: where is another Akunyili? The question is, in itself, an indictment of the years after her. Citizens do not summon the memory of a former official unless the present arrangement has failed them. To long for her is to say that the agency, as it stands, is not doing what she proved it could do. The comparison is unavoidable because her results were visible. There were safer shelves, unsettled counterfeiters and a public that felt protected.
However, nostalgia is not a restorative strategy, and Nigerians deserve more than a reflective glance backwards. NAFDAC needs prosecutors who convert seizures into convictions and courts that impose penalties severe enough to deter. It needs to pursue importers and financiers rather than only traders in open markets. It needs a public registry that any citizen can check in seconds, tamper-resistant authentication on every regulated product, laboratories that are properly funded and independently audited, and a leadership that is insulated from the political and commercial pressures that dilute enforcement. Above all, it needs the moral urgency that once defined it.
Akunyili proved that Nigeria is not condemned to live among fakes. The agency she led once made criminals fear the law and citizens trust the label. Until her successors recover that resolve, every act of remembrance for her leadership will remain a measure of NAFDAC’s failure.
