The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) revealed that they are working to reduce drug importation from 70% to 30% by 2025.
Yesterday in Lagos, the Director-General of NAFDAC, Mojisola Adeyeye, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that their plan can be achieved through the increase in the manufacturing of drugs in Nigeria.
She explained that increasing drug manufacturing in Nigeria would help restrain the widespread use of substandard drugs and ensure drug security in Nigeria.
“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 a country will get substandard drugs, and if not for COVID-19, we wouldn’t have woken up from our slumber as a country.” She said
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“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 has happened before.”
“So, we want to change the 70 percent importation of drugs into the country to 30 percent 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.”
The Director General also said that the agency had also reduced the shipment of drugs from other foreign countries like China and India into the country.
