DRUGS IMPORTED TO BE MANUFACTURED LOCALLY — NAFDAC

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) said it would ensure that 60 per cent of the drugs being imported into the country were manufactured locally.

Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, the Director-General of the agency, disclosed this at a news conference, at Abuja. She stressed the need for the agency to ensure that local pharmaceutical manufacturing sector thrived, adding that a significant amount of substandard and falsified drugs were creeping into the country.

 Prof Mojisola Adeyeye said “We want the local manufacturing sector to thrive; we want a situation whereby 60 per cent of the country’s products are manufactured locally’’. She said that a significant amount of substandard and falsified medicines were being imported as unregistered or registered but with compromise on the content after approval to become substandard.

 However she said one of the drives of my administration is to encourage local manufacturing for products that can be manufactured in Nigeria. She stated that the agency now encouraged innovation from local manufacturers by giving five-year market exclusivity to the innovator- company with the capacity to meet the country’s demand.

 Adeyeye added that during the period, there would be no approval of a similar product to ensure that products manufactured, imported, distributed and sold after registration or renewal of registration conformed with quality specifications.

 She said that the agency had four laboratories, with ISO-17025 accreditation across the country, to test the quality of medicines; vaccines test kits and other biological products.

Adeyeye said that NAFDAC had overhauled its testing of products coming from China and India by re-certification of clean report and analysis agents as well as laboratories from those countries. In her final remark she said, there aim was to ensure that the imported products were tested by qualified laboratories. The NAFDAC director-general said that part of the restrictions was streamlining the pre-shipment testing, with testing done post-shipment.