The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says it intends to minimize the importation of drugs from 70% to 30% by the year 2025.
Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, the Director-General of NAFDAC, told journalists of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Wednesday that it could be attained through steadily increasing local drug manufacturing.
Increased local medication manufacturing, according to Adeyeye, will serve to minimize the predominance of bad drugs and ensure drug security in the country.
According to her
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.
