The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says it has partnered with the National Counter Terrorism Centre, Office of the National Security Adviser (NCTC-ONSA) to strengthen its fight against drug counterfeiting, abuse and unwholesome foods.
This is contained in a statement signed by the Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, and made available to newsmen in Abuja on Saturday.
Adeyeye noted that the partnership also included the fight against unauthorised handling of chemicals which was part of the things fuelling terrorists operations and other criminal activities in the country.
The NAFDAC boss said the agency sealed the partnership when a delegation from the NCTC-ONSA, led by its National Coordinator, Maj.-Gen. Adamu Garba Laka, paid her a courtesy visit in Abuja.
According to her, NAFDAC is a World Health Organisation (WHO) Maturity Level 3 Regulatory Authority and is highly endowed with experts in terms of human resources, and well equipped WHO Pre-qualified Laboratories.
Adeyeye said that NAFDAC, being a regulatory agency, is supposed to have 12,000 staff but the staff the agency has at the moment is barely 2,000 in a country of more than 230 million people.
“Indonesian Regulatory Agency has over twenty thousand staff and the population of Indonesia is about 280 million.
“NAFDAC staff work around the clock. We are not just a civil service organisation but a regulatory body that is mandated to protect lives on a daily basis from food to drugs to water, precursors and chemicals that can fall into the hands of the terrorists.”
Adeyeye thanked the Office of the National Security Adviser for returning NAFDAC to the ports in 2018, a year after her assumption of office as the Director-General of NAFDAC.
“So, this partnership between the two strategic agencies in the country at this point is very apt to safeguard the lives our citizens,” the NAFDAC boss said.
Adeyeye recalled that NAFDAC was out of the ports for seven years between 2011 and 2018 for reasons she said herself was not aware of, while sharing her passion and commitment for a better and secured country.
She said that there was need for NAFDAC to return to the Ports, adding that a lot of things went wrong when NAFDAC was pulled out of the ports.
She added that anything bad was coming to Nigeria in terms of drugs, precursors, adding that tramadol was rampant in the country.
“Our young people were getting mad at this period. Suicide bombing was at the peak. At this period, I said do we really know what we are doing?
“NAFDAC is charge with drug regulation. We are in charge of chemical and NAFDAC was removed from the ports for seven years. That is part of why terrorism became big in the country.
“I always refer to NCTC-ONSA as one of the agencies that helped us to go back to the ports. I commended the relentless efforts of the NCTC-ONSA in supporting NAFDAC to return to the port,” she stressed.
Adeyeye said that NAFDAC will continue to work with the organisation to ensure that sanity returns to the country, while issuing a stem warning to criminals who deal with substandard and falsified medicines to desist.
The D-G thanked the security agencies for their support during the recent relocation of the Open Drug Market in Kano to the Coordinated Wholesale Centre in Dangwauro and Justice Simon Amobeda for watershed judgement.
She said that the judgment affirmed the relocation of the market.
On his part, Maj. Gen. Laka said that his team were in NAFDAC office to solicit the agency’s support in deploying of some its officers to the NCTC to operate in its Forensic, Toxicology, Biological and Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) Laboratories.
He said that the embodiment of knowledge in the area of science and research standout NAFDAC in the community of World Regulatory Authorities.
He pledged his continuous support to the NAFDAC in the area of operations, research, Laboratory testing and investigation.
He also sought NAFDAC’s support to the Centre in the area of operationalisation of the laboratory equipment and analysis for it to achieve its objective.
Laka equally thanked NAFDAC D-G for releasing one of her staff to the Centre and requested for more staff from the agency. (NAN
