Juliet Jacob Ochenje
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has warned food manufacturing companies that it will no longer accept poorly packed, destroyed, expired or stolen products snuck into the market through scavengers at waste dump sites, thereby endangering lives of innocent consumers, particularly, children.
The Director General, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, dropped the warning at the Agency’s Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Directorate Stakeholders Engagement with food sector operators in Lagos, where she insisted that ‘’if a product doesnt have NAFDAC number we can’t guarantee the safety’’.
Unequivocally condemning the habit of parading unbranded cereals in the open market, Prof. Adeyeye warned that when a product is not certified by NAFDAC, it is not advised that anybody should consume it, adding that the unbranded products in the market, do not have NAFDAC registration/marketing authorisation number.
“We cannot speak to the safety of unbranded food in the open market, we do not know where they have come from and we don’t know anything about the expiry date we cannot trace,” she said.
In 2021 and 2022, she recalled that the agency carried out a lot of investigation and enforcement activities on unbranded cereals leading to the arrest of some people that were selling online in Onitsha and brought them to Lagos.
According to her, further investigations revealed that most of the products were stolen from company warehouses ‘’because we found out that not all the products had expired, some of them were in company’s packaging materials when diverted to sell in retail prices online and in the marketplaces.’’
Last year the Agency uncovered two warehouses at Trade Fair Complex, Lagos loaded with N3 billion worth of counterfeit drugs and childrens cereals picked from dump sites.
‘’We also must sensitise the industry because if there are compromises in the industry, it could lead to serious dangers to our health,” she said.
