NAFDAC has set a new deadline to increase locally manufactured drugs to 70 per cent.
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The Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye disclosed this on Wednesday.
She reiterated the effort of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control on the reduction of drug importation.
According to Adeyeye, Nigeria relies on 70 per cent of international drugs and 30 per cent of local drugs.
However, the D-G NAFDAC said that by 2025 the tables would turn. She explained that Nigeria would produce 70 per cent of drugs and buy 30 per cent of foreign drugs.
She spoke on her dedication to boosting the local drug industry. A sector she said would help reduce the sale of substandard drugs in Nigeria.
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Her words:
“We are using multifaceted approaches to curb substandard and falsified medicine in the country.
“If a country is over-dependent on importation of medicine, such country will get substandard drugs and if not for COVID-19, we wouldn’t have woken up from our slumber as a country.
“When I started my tenure, local manufacturing of medicine became my focus because when you increase local manufacturing you are not just giving more jobs or increasing the GDP.
“Most, importantly, you are safeguarding the health of the nation because if somebody is falsifying something on Ota, for example, we can get there within one hour and something like that had happened before.
“So, we want to change the 70 per cent importation of drugs into the country to 30 per cent by 2025, so that as a nation we can say we have drug security because we don’t have that now.
“A country that is not drug secure is not secured in other facets”.
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Prof Adeyeye also spoke on the strict regulation on drug importation.
“We have read our riot act to drugs manufacturers who bring their drugs to the country if they want to be friends in trade with Nigeria.
“If they want to be friends with us, they should do what we want and not send what will kill our people, and that is why we have tightened shipment of drugs into the country.
“We have been to China and India and now we deal with the lab directly not the agents like what it used to be before,” Adeyeye stated.
Source: PUNCH HealthWise
