The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has said over 50 percent of certificates of pharmaceutical products (CPP) of medicines imported into Nigeria are fake.
The Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, disclosed this at the stakeholders’ engagement meeting with regulators, policymakers, and law enforcement agencies on Monday, February 5, in Abuja.
A certificate of a pharmaceutical product is a document issued in a format recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that establishes the status of the product in the exporting country.
According to her, “We have 55 countries in Africa and we belong to the Member States globally and we agreed to ensure that products coming to the region are of quality and WHO created a scheme called certificate of pharmaceutical product, and what this means is that if we send a certificate of pharmaceutical product out to another country, we are assuring the receiving country that it will be of quality.
Most of our medicines come from South East Asia and we belong to the member states too. We have a scheme where before medicines that were approved leave that part of the world, we do pre-shipment testing, and that comes with CPP to assure us of quality, but that is not the case, because through our scheme we have been able to stop over 140 products that were approved from coming in.
We found out that more than 50 per cent of the CPPs that come into our country are fake. Part of the responsibility is our people that go to China or India and we are going to deal with it. It’s a Member States issue, and we are going to deal with it.
We are very stringent than ever and there is no cutting of corners, we have blacklisted many companies, we have sanctioned them because we want people to respect our people.
Trade is a mutual agreement and if that agreement is harming one part of the agreement, we will stop it. If a company is suspected to be compromising, in two hours we will be there, and we will shut the company down.”
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