*High Cost of Drugs due to Economic Problems in Nigeria
*Our Website was Despicable
*Corruption Eaten into the Fiber of NAFDAC
In superintending the affairs of NAFDAC since her appointment as the Director-General, Professor Mojisola Adeyeye has brought along with her inexhaustible innovations, unequivocally sweeping the Commission clean of decadence, bureaucratic bottlenecks, and system ineptitudes. The Professor of Pharmacology who is remarkably clinical in discharging her duties is confronting drug cabals previously known for resisting regulations and daring authorities. But, she is dauntless and even ruthlessly committed to change the narrative as came on board with a disposition that has fired up the NAFDAC workforce to be more diligent in service.
The NAFDAC boss in this interview penultimate Thursday, in her office at the corporate headquarters of the Commission spoke on salient issues that opened some hard facts that no one else aside her can talk with competence.
John Nwokocha shares with you the Red- Hot Exclusive Interview. Read on.
Could you evaluate how you have waged a war against illicit and counterfeit drugs since you assumed office as DG in 2017?
Well, I got to NAFDAC in November 2017. November 30, to be precise. And that is after living outside Nigeria for 37 years. And I knew what it was in terms of quality of medicine before my family emigrated to the US. I was the Pharmacist in-charge of the Baptist Medical Centre in Ogbomosho. And, I knew the quality of medicines in those days. We were working with Missionaries-well-trained missionaries, doctors, nurses. And whenever they were going back to the US on holidays they went with fine medicines from Nigeria. I got back in 2016, and I knew the story has changed. Maybe a year before getting into NAFDAC, one of my closest friends came to Nigeria for holidays with the children. They were in Enugu. And Okechi was a child, he is a man now, was ill and they got him an antibiotics and the child was almost dead. When the family finally realized that the medicine might have falsified. So you can imagine coming home to your country and your child becomes and the child almost lost his life. This was part of what I knew before I got to NAFDAC. So, I knew there was a problem. But to address the problem frontally you have to have resources. There was none. We were in debt- N3.2 billion when naira was still good. When naira was N1million equalled almost $2000. And there was another N500 million they spent about two months before I assumed office. That was not part of the N3.2bn. I said really, is this the way money is spent in Nigeria? If you weren’t building a house or a building. If it is capital yes, but for current expenditure, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But in any case, when you have a challenge, you have to think of how to turn it into opportunities.
Where I worked for almost 40 years, NAFDAC could have gone bankrupt. They would have declared NAFDAC bankrupt. And finance house will come and start managing NAFDAC. But you have to pay finance house. I didn’t have money to pay finance house. I called Price Water Coper, PWC, because I knew somebody there. But I knew they were going to charge. We didn’t have money. I said Okay we will first of all pay our debts. Why? Because people thought NAFDAC must have money that’s why they paid N3.2 billion in one year. No. we didn’t have money. I wanted to teach everybody how not to owe debt. You cut your coat according to your clothes. But no. corruption has eaten into the fibre of the Agency. We cut down unnecessary expenses. I was at a meeting. I think it was in Tanzania or South Africa or whatever and my colleague said where is your contingent – those people that came with you. I said for what? They said your predecessors used to come with 10 or more people. That they come with Estacode. They said the vehicles we were taking from the hotel to the meeting centre wouldn’t have taken the people that used to come with my predecessors to meetings. That is part of cutting down on unnecessary expenses. Expenses that do not have value tied to them. You spent money, let’s see the value. If there’s no value tied to an expense it shouldn’t be spent. We started using Zoom in March 2018. My staff didn’t like it at first to cut down expenses. The world is too small now. It’s good to have in-person meetings psychologically. But technology has taken us to a place where that doesn’t have to happen. It can happen once in a while but not every time. So, we cut down expenses, unnecessary meetings. And we were getting more efficient with the zoom technology. Because it is not like meeting supposed to start at 10am and they will say it is 10 for 11, which I don’t buy. Or they will say Oh is 10 o’clock and they are still waiting for somebody to come in at 11and they will start praying. Praying for what? You were late and praying we don’t know. But to cut the story short within a year, we paid the debts because we started teaching ourselves how not to owe debt. Personally, if you are owing somebody you won’t be able to sleep in the night. Or when you see the person, you start shaking thinking he’s going to ask you for his money. Is a way of making life liveable individually, not to talk of even corporately. If you borrow money make sure you can pay it. If you take loan, make sure you can pay it. If you cannot pay you better know that you are going to pay it. If you cannot pay shut it off. So, talking of falsified standard medicines it is money you are going to use to buy laboratory equipment to test whether it is sub- standard or not. If it is substandard you go after them with enforcement. Now with enforcement it is vehicles that you are going to use. It is vehicles you are going to use to do inspection. We didn’t have vehicles. Lab equipment, vehicles, there was no senior staff or director that had a laptop No single staff of NAFDAC that had laptop in 2017. It was computer that we used to collate documents. It is computer that we used monitor things that were going on, MSMEs. We just embrace MSMEs at that point. And I remember the vice presidency saying, we want to make sure 30 days, 40 days, you know. It is computer you have to do work. And make sure that the process is working. Our website was despicable. As a regulatory agency other agencies in the world must get a lot of data from your website. Except the ones that are confidential. No. We didn’t have the competition, culture. We started training ourselves aside from learning how not to owe debt, how to think quality, it is quality that mitigates substandard falsified medicines is when I’m thinking of who is going to use our medicine. But I will now say let me make sure I do my work well. Because I’m thinking of the customer. That is what we started training ourselves in, quality management system.
Thank God that I was in an institution in the US, a mission university where they thought that they can give scholarship to everybody without knowing where the money is going to come from. So that institution also almost went bankrupt. And when I got to the institution not knowing that they had financial trouble, the president of the university, came in maybe six months before me. And that president said that we all need our brain to be washed. This is America, we all need our brains to be watched by thinking quality, thinking of the customer. For the university, is the students for NAFDAC, is the 250 million people. We went through training for three years, every week, or every other week, we went into the student union building to get our brains washed. That experience helped me here. I said all of us also need our brains to be washed. With training, with thinking differently.
Not coming to work and say ah it doesn’t matter. I’m working for government, whether I do it, no. you are stealing from the government. If you are paid and you don’t give the value for the payments.
Again, we are talking standard falsified medicines it is money that we use to ensure that the staff are well compensated. Our staff are not well compensated. I think it was towards the end of my first year a director came and showed me what he was getting, I said really. Well, I shouldn’t say really because I knew I wasn’t even looking at my own salary. I couldn’t look at my salary. Because what I was getting was less than 5% of what I was getting in the US, per month. But I came here to serve, to remove shame, to reduce the level of shame that Nigeria carries all over the world.
I do my own small part. So, I started meeting with the staff. They grab something that they call productivity allowance for one month salary to pay for them. They may get it three times, four times by the you know it whether you want to pay school fees for children or whatever. They couldn’t. So, there was a lot of strike, industrial strike in NAFDAC. Because the workforce is not well motivated. That is key, especially for an agency like NAFDAC, where somebody wants to clear their goods instead of 20 million naira. He said, can I give you 5 million naira and you take 1 million naira. Prune to compromise. And yet, the salary is so poor. This poor salary is in the Sub-Saharan Africa for all regulatory agencies, I have my colleagues there because we don’t think of what regulatory agency is or does. We work round the clock. A director will call me for enforcement at one o’clock am, Prof, we are the ports, we are trying to catch this truck that is going to fly out of the ports. Because they’re carrying contrabands. 1 am, should I say Oh, call me back in the morning. No. And I’m sleeping by my husband and a call came in the night. Should I say oh, call me in my family person I cannot talk to you now. No. we work round the clock.
Why, because for substandard falsified medicines are a multi- targeted approach.
Multi targeted approach. I mentioned enforcement it is money that does enforcement. I mentioned inspection, Good Manufacturing Practice inspection. We started a roadmap of going around all the companies in Nigeria. We went around 165 companies in 2018-2019.
Why did we start it? I was at the American embassy on a courtesy call. The ambassador asked, do you have medicines from Nigeria for the commodity that you use. I said no. I don’t blame you. I will not buy it too. But we’re going to make it change. So, it was USAID that sponsored that GMP Roadmap because we didn’t even have money at that time to do it.
We went round and many of the companies said what happened. You gave us approval two years ago, now we are non-compliant. Because we’re using international standards to reduce substandard falsified medicines. We cannot use Nigerian standard. We cannot use Africa standard. It’s international standard in order to protect public health.
So that is inspection. So, we then categorised our companies into three- low risk, medium risk, and high risk. What did we get out of it? The high risk started working hard to become medium. The medium risks they’re working hard to become low risk.
Change in culture, change in thinking. Another means of reducing substandard falsified medicines is local manufacturing. So, local manufacturing is important. A company, we’ve got an intelligence that a company is making… is compromising their quality. In two hours, we were there. And we shut them down. My inspector called me DG this is bad. What should I do? I said shut everything down. There were a lot of strings that were being pulled. Oh pressure, pressure. It is public health first. We shut them down, gave them correction, corrective actions, preventive actions to do, before we can open them up. You cannot do that for oversea company, or foreign manufacturing company to local manufacturing is very important. We did a small study. Let’s see how many products, what types of products do we import? What types of products do we have in the country that we manufacture? Why are we importing products that you can manufacture, and the stock capacity has not been met? It’s not like they will they are working four shifts per day in the country. No.
So, we started what is called the five plus five policy. The last renewal will be the last renewal. During that five years of grace towards the end of the third year, you have to tell us I’m going to migrate to local manufacturing if you are an importer. Show us that you will migrate, or you will partner with other companies if you don’t have money. Why? Because local manufacturing is access. Strong regulatory agency and local manufacturing is quality, is access to quality medicine. Access to quality medicine. So local manufacturing is one of the approaches.
Okay Prof, if I may butt in, is interesting you touched on the 5 plus 5. I think this is an innovation that you introduced. I like you to speak to how effective this has worked.
It has changed the paradigm. Because after the 5 Plus 5, you see companies started first of all partnering with local manufacturers, contract manufacturing. Okay, I’ve been making x drugs, importing them before. But somebody’s already making x drugs in Nigeria. I will do contract manufacturing with that company. Now we have through that five plus five, we have an increase in new companies. Maybe about 12 to 50% of new companies based on five plus five alone. Not companies that just want to develop something. It has been significant. I’m happy that Naira is becoming stronger. Excuse me. Naira is becoming stronger now. Because we started this Halleluiah thing in the industry and then the Naira problem came, what you could buy for one naira, now you buy it for three and our companies do not make any gains. We import raw materials, we import everything. So it was kind of a jeopardy for a company, for an industry that was really trying to grow. And all of a sudden the naira crisis came in. But, at least is getting stronger now. This is the trend. Local manufacturing. We cannot manufacture everything. But we’ve been doing local for 30% of everything and importing 70%. We want to turn it around. And we are turning it around already.
Prof. You are aware also, (and this this is very important) that this 5 + 5 you brought on board, juxtaposes it to the high cost of drugs, many manufacturers are shutting down, if they have not completely shut down. Could you help us understand how this has helped?
First of all, we have to look at this holistically. The high cost of drug is not because we did 5+5. It is actually opposite. The high cost of drugs is because of the Naira problem. Foreign exchange, manufacturers couldn’t get the dollar to buy what they need. And then of course those are the key issues to the drug costs. But when you think again of Nigeria not making a single component of a tablet, for example, and tablets, may have five components. The drug, and the non-active. We don’t even make starch. We couldn’t even make starch because we weren’t dependable, we’re addicted to importation. Addition. But as soon as I came on board I said let’s start thinking. We’re not going to be able to make everything locally. But let’s turn it around. So the high costs of drug are mainly due to the economic problems in the country, that was started by the naira issues. That is making companies not to be able to get foreign exchange and also because of some of the medicines that these two international companies, multinational were selling, they packed their load and went. And that is actually good for us today. When you depend on multinationals to get everything for you why can’t you get your own. So, it’s good in the sense that we are getting over it. But what is the choice? Continue to import? So that what happened during the pandemic is not will be enough to warn us. Because during the pandemic we went through hell. Because everybody started minding their own business. African countries were left hanging because they were too dependent on imports. Again, we cannot manufacture everything locally but not to the point of being addicted that we cannot even make starch. So, that is Local manufacturing. NAFDAC was 25 years when I joined or about 25 years. There was no good distribution practice. That is, they did not practice good distribution practice. And our mandate says, to control, to regulate, importation, exportation, manufacture, distribution. That distribution was not in our dictionary for 25 years. But let’s go back quickly to before my time,2011 to 2018 NAFDAC was removed from the ports. May be the reason, cabal or whatever, I don’t know NAFDAC was removed from the ports. And we deal with thousands of products coming into the country. We are overdependent on importation, we were removed from the ports. Can you imagine that equation is not adding up. Tramadol, codeine was being grossly abused. And at that point. I got a got a call from my higher up intelligence, saying, 31 containers of TRAMADOL were coming into the country. NAFDAC make sure you intercept them. And I said can this be real. Or is somebody playing a prank on me. And I called using another number. I sent an email. I have a private mail. Sir are you the one that sent this message? He said yeah go after them. Tramadol was being reined on us. I said is there a plan to wipe Nigeria off the market. That was how bad it was. It was the national security advisor’s office that came to us to join us fight the war and to go back to the ports. Because at that point there were so many suicide bombers especially in Abuja. And we started tracing Tramadol in their scattered tissues. Then they said ah, NAFDAC must go back to the ports. On May 16, 2018, we went back to the ports. But something that has gone wrong for seven years? There were cabals that were already formed. They cannot be removed overnight. That is why we are using multi -strategic approach- good distribution practice. First of all, you removed NAFDAC from the Ports. And now things got bad NAFDAC was not even doing distributions, inspection. So, it is double jeopardy got ourselves in. In fact, it will continue to be in my memory. It’s been etched in my mind.
But one day the direct of ports inspection sent me a picture of our staff working outside their office in the ports. Because they don’t have a place there, they wer sitting inside the car and it was raining so they put a big umbrella. I said really, this is NAFDAC sitting in their vehicle to do their work at the ports. Because that was the only alternative, only choice. They used a big umbrella as shelter, so we started shouting. That was when the NSA came to help us, and we went back. So, we now have good distribution practice, legal framework. We have to have it gazetted. But all these are not just happening like that. It is first because we embraced quality system. Secondly, we want to join other countries by embracing WHO global benchmarking. It was high time we stopped comparing ourselves with ourselves. We have to compare ourselves with the best. If we want to go into international arena for trade, you better compare yourselves with the best because it’s not an easy tough outside there. It is contested with quality. So, we started doing good distribution practice. We started practising it. We have gone over almost 1000 now distribution site inspection, inspecting for good storage. Because if we don’t store well, the product may degrade even if it came in as a very good product with international specifications and so on.
We have gone over at least 940, almost 1000 distribution sites still going, and we are categorizing them into low risk, into medium risk, and into high risk. If you are high risk, I’m going to be on your case for you to correct the ways. If you’re medium risk, make sure you go to low risk. So, it depends on the frequency of inspection. Thereafter, will depend on the categorization.
We are now using technology because we cannot not use technology. Many of our processes started getting digitised because if you digitise your system, your process there will be transparency. If digitise your system, there will be less human to human interaction. I will give you money you do me a favour that will go. We started decreasing that. In fact, I just got an email from my ports inspection directorate now. That for e-clearance we just added another feature to it. So that you can monitor narcotics as they come in.
We can monitor chemicals that we’re in charge of also, in terms of where they are going. So we’re using what is called traceability. Track and trace. It is a back coding system. It is GS One technology that is being used.
We are the leading national regulatory authority in Africa. People are coming to understudy us on how we’re doing it. We are the second leading in the world, in terms of using that technology. We use it to monitor all the vaccines that came into the country. If you have a box inside that box, you have another set of boxes. We call that secondary packaging. The big box is tertiary packaging. Inside our secondary packages you now have your vials or your bottles small things, those are primary packaging. We scanned about 2 million secondary packages of vaccines. Meaning, those vaccines have their own vials and in each vial you may have 10 dozes. We did that. When some of these vaccines came without back coding, we decided we were going to serialise our own, we’re going to put our own back code on it. Because we have smart staff. Human capital is part of what is helping us. Not based on where you came from. Not based on whether you’re my relative or my enemy or whatever it is. No. it is what can you offer? And we will take you to where you want to go. So technology has been big for us. GS One technology.
Enforcement. Yes, I’ve mentioned that. Another problem we have had that predated me is open markets. Open drug markets. I don’t know whether there are other countries in the world that do what Nigeria does-where you can buy anything you want. It’s not like that. I was volunteering when I got to the US in a hospital. 24 hours in the hospital and 16 hours in a community pharmacy. I cannot take a tablet without a prescription, and I was working there. I cannot take a single tablet without getting a prescription. We don’t have a prescription policy. Anybody can buy anything. So, what predated me was what the government wanted to do to remove the open marketers to a location where we could monitor them. They call it coordinated Wholesales centers. In Kano, Aba, Lagos, and Onitsha.
Kano was the first one that built their own in Dangoro. The marketers took the Pharmacy Council to court. There are two regulatory agencies, the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria and NAFDAC. Pharmacy Council regulates at the retail level, downstream. We regulate both.
But they took pharmacy council to court for 10 years. It was Justice Amoboda who heard that monumental judgment on February 16 that said enough is enough. The damage that bad medicines are doing to our people. We got to have a way of stopping it.
So, we started moving them. They attacked us. But they went for a stay of execution. The court stuck it down. So, now in fact we have moved almost all of them to the coordinated wholesales center. And we have the pharmacy office, we have the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria office there where we just go down and start checking. That is another way of mitigating falsified substandard medicines.
We also have handheld devices that is costlier than building one house. Handheld devices, we are going to launch it very soon. You put it on a tablet. You don’t need to take the tablet out of the plastic, and it will tell you is paracetamol, or Panadol or ampicillin.
We have to use all the resources that we have. We are challenged because we have about five countries surrounding us that are weak. So, people just bring whatever they want into the country especially in the north and Benin borders. So, these are the challenges that we have that we have to or we are facing in our customised way.
One can say interestingly you are tackling these challenges through your determination to clean up the system. But may ask, could you help Nigerians understand what you mean when you talk about the use of one NAFDAC number for several products by the same company. For instance, we have seen some bleaching cream making companies who use one number for different products.
Yes that is one challenge that we have as an agency. It is one of the very difficult challenges we have. Unlike solid dosage forms like tablets, you have to set up a machine. You have to set up a room. You can have this cosmetic in your own bedroom. You can do it in your own parlour. Nobody will know and then you start selling it to your friends. People add apricot and pawpaw. Do you know what is inside pawpaw? Do you know what is inside apricot? When you combine them do you know what the product is? Because when you combine the two do you know what the product of that combination is. So, we’re now doing a lot of sensitizations. Many of our people don’t know. many of our people think that because your skin is lighter, you’re not in danger. They’re already sowing seed for cancer. In fact, we had maybe over six months or eight months of focus zonal Health Journalists NAFDAC sensitization in 2023. Yes, it is sensitization. They sell some of these products online. We are going after them. Our post marketing surveillance has invited Konga or whatever they call them. Who gave them permission to bring all these things. We are in the ports, airports, seaports. So, we cease these products now. But it is with a lot of sensitizations convincing them to come and register. If we do research on it, not if we do research on it, if we assess it during approval process we will not approve. It’s going to cause harm. But many of our people are not conversant at all. Because they think it’s going on the skin, it penetrates. Drugs can penetrate as fast as swallowing it. It depends on where you put it. If you put it under your tongue straight it goes into the blood stream quickly.
It’s going to just get into the bloodstream quickly. So, because it’s not swallowed, doesn’t mean it’s not getting absorbed fast. It depends on how fast it to a major artery or vein is. So, for the cosmetics, we are getting tighter. In terms of our enforcement. We go to trade fares. And we seize them in truckloads and destroy them. Again, if people don’t feel that their pocket is being hurt it will not serve as a deterrent. But once you know you are losing 50 million naira here, two years ago you will lose 20 million naira, then where is the bottom line in terms of profits. Then, they will start thinking. We are very innovative the way we think as a country, but we don’t challenge it in the right or positive way. In the rights way that will actually make us known for many things. I hope I answered your question, but we are working on it. But it is one thing that it is difficult to know who is making something in their rooms and they are selling it to the public.
Quickly, can you speak to the role of your newly established office the proceeds of crime office.
We just opened it. We just opened that office we have not really gotten any money. What we do is we go after the big guys behind many of these trafficking, we don’t usually get hold of them. It is their foot soldiers that we catch. So, to get the big guys to seize their property that has happened once, before my time. Maybe it was before I came in. but at that point even these proceeds of crime bill was not in place. But now of course we can seize the property and the money go into the government’s pocket and then it can allocate to us whatever it thinks. But as we speak, it is not like we have gotten any big catch to translate to proceeds.
Okay, despite the economic challenges in the country you gained the WHO pre- qualification certification for some of products. How did you get this?
Okay, for regulatory agency, we can get maturity level. They can give us certification or recognition for being higher maturity level. And then, we can also get our requests pre- qualified. We don’t work with products. It is manufacturing companies that get their products pre- qualified. But we it is the level of maturity, how our strong regulatory agency is which is determined or, which is described by maturity level. How did we get to maturity level three? How did we get our central door control lab to be prequalified? It is the summation of what I have been saying. Good governance. Good leadership. Good workforce force, motivated workforce, tapping talents. For the laboratory, let me just give you an example. We have three big laboratories in Lagos and four across the country. We have the food laboratory in Oshodi. We have the drug laboratory in Yaba. We also have the vaccine Laboratory in Yaba which will soon move to Oshodi. But when I got to NAFDAC, I went to deliver my welcome speech and I said let’s go to the lab and I was shell shocked. Because about 80% of the equipment were not working. In the drug lab in Yaba there is an instrument that is routinely used called high performance liquid chromatography. They had one and a half pieces of the equipment. It was around that time that I went to Israel. Israel had 600 I think at that point, Israel had like 600 products, and they had 23 HPLC. We have 1000s of products and we had one and a half. Money that you stole cannot be used to procure equipment. A debtor cannot have money to procure equipment. Now we have 70 of such and still counting. That is just for drug lab. Israel doesn’t do food. They do only drugs. The had about 600 products in their profile and they have 23 or 20 whatever HPLCs. Now for the food. If we add all the HPLCs we have now, it’s not less than 34. It’s not less than 34, aside from more sophisticated pieces of equipment, very very sophisticated. If you want to do Vitamin B12 that comes very tiny amounts, multivitamin or food or whatever. You’ve got to use very sensitive equipment. They’re very costly. I’m just giving the example of the HPLC. We didn’t have good quality management system. The quality management system actually started in the lab before my time. But you cannot have quality management system in a lab, and you have overall non- quality management system in the Agency. It cannot work. That was why we did Agency- wide training. So, everybody started buying in. Because the lab is not standing on its own. The lab has to interact with the inspection, the lab has to interact with registration. So, when everybody started buying into all this, we started making the lab efforts more impactful.
Of course, when they first came in 2019, they said oh, your instruments are still not enough. Maybe you had five at that time. When they came in 2023 January things had changed. It is money that did that. It is good leadership that did that. It is not because I’m sitting here that’s what I will say even if I’m not the one here if I’m talking to somebody about NAFDAC and I saw what they have done. So just knowing that we are supposed to build this nation one agency at a time.
Could you speak about the risk being faced by your staff, particularly the task force members.
We all knew that happened some time ago in the course of their work. And of course, how vulnerable they have become serving the nation.
What do you have in place for them, in terms of welfare, motivation and their protection against attacks.
First of all, that productivity allowance they get it at once. So, they can use that money the way they want. We have gotten few other allowances we are waiting also for global approval of allowance that our staff deserve.
You know, there is what is called user fees that we charge people to do inspection to do laboratory testing. Those monies are not supposed to be touched by the government. No. From the user fees, the staff will spend extraordinary time in the lab. These fees are supposed to be used to compensate them and it’s not just the people in the lab, the people doing the accounting too. They spend a lot of time to catch up with the pace that we are all in. So, in terms of allowance our staff are better off. We’re not there. We’re not there at all. In terms of hazards, including me. We just have to be very cautious. We have to be very cautious. They have attacked physically, injured staff. We had death treats because of what because we want to safeguard the health of our people. We want to be sure that they’re using the right medicine. So, we’re very careful where we go. I’m privileged to have police with me 24 hours in Abuja, Lagos. Almost all our staff don’t enjoy this priviledge, they just have to be careful, because all the staff cannot get police with them. But that is the nature of our job that people don’t understand.
We are all in God’s hands. Finally, I’d like you to talk about traditional medicine in Nigeria. And finally. How do you want to see the Agency after you exit office.
First of all, I was brought up on herbal medicines. So, it’s not new to me.
(Cut in) So when the King of England was talking about using herbs for his cancer treatment, you weren’t surprised.
You know that herbal medicines have killed so many people too. This is a fact that you don’t know. And because we are so fatalistic. The fact that it’s herbal doesn’t mean it cannot kill. So, it is now making sure that the measure, the dose, research on toxic toxicity is all done well. But NAFDAC is one of the regulatory agencies in the world that has some structure for herbal medicine approval. We have listed approval for two years. We will run some tests to make sure that that drug is not going to kill somebody.
Because many of these drugs our forefathers have used them before. But we will now do modern testing to make sure that it’s not going to kill based on the dose that they say that they are using.
So, we give listed approval. And then we advise them to go and do clinical trial. But even we that aid that we know that the country is not set up for that.
Because you as an herbal practitioner don’t have money to do clinical trials.
You don’t even understand what clinical trial is. So, the ecosystem is not there yet. And that is part of what we’re trying to create. To link herbal practitioners to universities, researchers that are interested. So that what what they have as things their forefathers have been using that has been working the university professors can then do research on these. But even university professors need money. So, part of what we are trying to do is to choose maybe three or four and fund them so that even if is two products that have good clinical data, we can then make it as a national formulary that doctors can recommend.
Because they have the published data not only for Nigeria but internationally accepted. So that is where we are going in terms of herbal medicines. But we are blessed with great biodiversity. We are so blessed. Even our food that we eat has antioxidants. If we eat well, they can serve as medicine sometimes. Because a lot of our food especially natural foods, not semi-processed or processed in vegetables, fruits, many of them are loaded with antioxidants that fight oxidant that will kill the cells or make the cells to start multiplying in a bad way. So that’s it about herbal medicines. But it is this collaboration with the industry, university and funding them in a little way. The government is supposed to be doing some of these fundings.
You go to America; you have a National Science Foundation. You have National Institutes of Health. Billions of dollars are given to those institutes to assess hundreds of proposals every year and see which one they can fund. And that turns into medicines. Zidovudine which is a medicine for HIV AIDS that first started. It was based on university funding that turned it around to be the first medicine to be used for HIV AIDS. So that is how the funding ecosystem, or the support of the government translate but at least we do our own small part and see what happens.
I want to make sure that when I come back in 10 years, that will be several years from my end term.
I want to see a NAFDAC that is very digitized. We about 70% now. But to be so well digitized, transparent, we need staff. We are so short staffed. I want to see a NAFDAC that has maybe, four times the number of staff we have now. We have 2000 staff. We’re supposed to have 12,000 staff based on our population. But we have2000. You know because when you are stressed as a staff sometimes your productivity is also declined.
So that is part of what I want to see in the future.
Less human interaction. Less man-to-man interaction once we digitize. Because by culture, you think you cannot, somebody cannot do something for you unless you give the person. No. If it is something from our culture, we have to break it using technology.
Because if you compromise on that you get money. It means you have bias in assessing that product. And if the product is no good, oh my, thousands and thousands will be affected.
So that is NAFDAC of the future. Less compromise through digitization, a lot of staff okay. Thank you very much.
