EDITORIAL: NAFDAC: Step up offensive against fake products, and their masterminds

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), in a renewed effort to enforce its mandate, bared its fangs against fake products manufacturers in the second half of 2024. In its wake, goods worth N120 billion were seized and destroyed between July and December across the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria.

This is heart-warming, as it came after a seeming period of inertia and when citizens’ health had become most vulnerable, arising from the merchandising of goods of all sorts, resulting from the prevailing high cost of living conditions, the type of which has not been seen in decades. The areas overwhelmed by this criminal engagement are Lagos, Aba, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Nasarawa, Kaduna and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. Products counterfeited include, but are not limited to, medicines, spirits, wines, rice, powdered milk, yoghurt, vegetable oil, noodles, bottled water and carbonated drinks.

Fake drugs worth N11 billion, according to NAFDAC, were destroyed in Ibadan in December. They were expired, unregistered or counterfeited. In Nasarawa, a factory that packaged 1,600 bags of fake rice worth over N5 billion was destroyed; just as the agency shutdown 150 shops at Eziukwu Aba market and uncovered large-scale counterfeited alcoholic drinks, alongside revalidated food items valued at more than N5 billion. In Lagos, NAFDAC also burst counterfeit alcohol packaging centres and seized items worth N2 billion at the Lagos Trade Fair Complex.

NAFDAC Logo

These traffickers in fake products are mass murderers who deserve the maximum legal clampdown. Their ubiquity and networks mean that no citizen or place is safe or beyond their reach. As a result, NAFDAC’s Enforcement, Pharmacovigilance, Investigation and Post-Marketing Surveillance Directorates have to up their game. Public health and the threat to life are at issue here.

The quantum of these destroyed items underscores the need for the Federal Government to take the work of NAFDAC seriously by empowering it with all the resources required to maximise its operational efficiency as the watchdog of public health. The offensive against counterfeiters is almost a perennial phenomenon, which its erstwhile Director-General, the late Professor Dora Akunyili, took to stratospheric levels, and, in the process, received global acclamation.

late Professor Dora Akunyili

But these “merchants of death” – as NAFDAC describes them – are unwavering in their illegal preoccupations. Footage of NAFDAC’s year-end operations have gone viral. They depict the insanitary environments within which killer-products were packaged, consisting of an assortment of chemicals, dirty water, and labelled spirit bottles. The targets of these nefarious activities of imitation are branded products that can easily be sold.

The strong message from those scenes of operation is that one can never be too careful in the procurement of foods and drugs, either in the open market or shops.

NAFDAC advises the public to watch out for spelling mistakes on labels of goods, poor packaging and unusually shaped bottles. While these red flags could help, they are not sufficient in all cases. The use of Truscan in identifying fake drugs and the mobile authentication service, involving unique 10-digit pins, are laudable. Yet, awareness about their deployment needs to be ratcheted up through the National Orientation Agency.

Regrettably, with the sophistication in printing technology in this age of the internet of things, a former Director General of NAFDAC, Dr Paul Orhii, lamented how difficult it has become, even for the most sophisticated pharmaceutical security expert, to identify a counterfeit drug by merely looking at it. Technology is evolving; therefore, the authorities have to put on their thinking caps to always be ahead of these adversaries of public health.

former DG Paul Orhii

Stopping the impunity should transcend impounding and destroying fake products, to getting the culprits to face the full wrath of the law. It is curious why the press release on the destruction of the N120 billion fake products did not contain the list of suspects who were arrested and are being subjected to the due process of the law. Nigeria has statutes for dealing with this rot, embodied in the Counterfeit and Fake Drugs and Unwholesome Food (CFDUF) Act of 2004 and The Copyright Act 2004. The former prescribes a N500,000 fine or jail term of up to five years or more for anyone convicted accordingly.

Even while these are not punitive enough, instances of their utilisation are few and far between. As such, PREMIUM TIMES calls on the present DG of NAFDAC, Professor Mojisola Adeyeye, to push through the strengthening of the law to provide for a punishment of life imprisonment for counterfeiters. The agency under Orhii’s leadership drove this agenda but the legislative process on a Bill to the National Assembly to this effect, could not be completed before the legislature’s life span lapsed.

Besides instant death in some cases, victims of counterfeit and unwholesome processed foods suffer damaged kidney, liver, skin and other organs. The lethal effect of the Mypikin syrup counterfeit saga, which killed about 80 Nigerian children in 2008, should ring a bell here. Used for treating sore gum in teething babies, the medication was contaminated with the engine coolant diethylene glycol. Two out of three suspects linked to the incident were sentenced to seven-year jail terms each, while the third died before the prosecution could commence. The Mypikin tragedy explains why the offence of counterfeiting drugs carries a life imprisonment term at the federal level in the US, according to Maysa Razavi, who was anti-counterfeiting Manager for the International Trademark Association (INTA) a few years ago.

Mypikin syrup

In Japan, the punishment for the offence is the death sentence. NAFDAC had once protested to the Japanese government about the production of fake products by their citizens, in connivance with some Nigerians. “The producers were prosecuted and sentenced to death, whereas Nigerians who imported the fake drugs went scot-free (literally) as a result of the leniency in the country’s fake drug laws,” Orhii noted.

China, where some Nigeria fake products merchants go to perfect their nefarious deals, has revised its law, making more counterfeit drugs manufacturers face criminal prosecution. Long term imprisonment is non-negotiable there. In 2008, two men found culpable for the poisonous milk powder that killed six babies and got 300,000 others ill, received death sentences.

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The time for blasé or official diffidence to this scourge is over. Nigeria has since 2017 been flagged in a report by the International Chamber of Commerce’s Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP), as the “gateway to the rest of Africa for counterfeit products.” If the economic climate then was relatively good when this salvo was fired, it is reasonable to assume how much the country would have degenerated on this issue as of 2024.

Just like illegal oil bunkerers, traffickers in fake products are dare-devils, who never relent in their dark commerce, which is further aided by weak regulation and widespread corruption. NAFDAC, therefore, should not take its foot off the gas in order to safeguard the public health.