The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) is working hard to eliminate drug insecurity in the country, Director General of the agency, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye has said.
She stated this yesterday in Abuja during a media briefing organised by the agency to mark its 25th year anniversary.
She said the agency’ s first DG, Dr. Dora Akunyili fought a good fight against substandard medicines in Nigeria, and that the agency was laying a foundation that would enable it exist for many decades to come without anyone having ability to destroy it.
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The NAFDAC boss said the agency was also working towards ensuring that local manufacturers sell their products globally.
““We are working towards improving local manufacturing to make sure we don’t have drug insecurity . We are changing so many policies. We are doing things to position NAFDAC as a competitive agency globally. Our Gross Domestic Product GDP when it comes to pharmaceutical manufacturing is low. Our goal is to improve the GDP, “ she said.
Prof Adeyeye said the agency has improved in service delivery, saying that based on the current process , an application for food gets to the final stage within 90 days whether it is approved or not, while application for drugs takes120 days.
“We are now doing e-registration. We now have 200 companies that are signing on it already,” she added.
She said the agency was able to pay the N3.2 billion debt, she met on resumption at the end of December last year.
On the reasons for celebration, she said: “Looking back, there were 6000 applications that were not processed and within two months we cleared the applications. That is what we can celebrate.
“From 2011 to 2018, NAFDAC was removed from the Ports and within that period the use of psychoactive medicines or drugs went up and our children became addicted and many homes became broken.
“But by 2018 May, we were returned back, that is why we are celebrating. We are not there yet, but we are now in the right path to do the control that we are supposed to do.”
The NAFDAC director- general said the agency was able to seize 23 containers of tramadol worth about 198 billion naira last year.
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