The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has disclosed how Nigeria can reduce the importation of drugs from its current 70% to 30% by 2025.
The food and drug regulator who is pushing towards making it possible said that this could be achieved through increased local manufacturing of drugs.
According to NAN, this was disclosed by the Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, on Wednesday in Lagos, as she also read the riot to drug manufacturers in the country.
Adeyeye said that increasing local drug manufacturing would help curb the prevalence of substandard drugs and ensure drug security in the country.
The NAFDAC boss said, “We are using multifaceted approaches to curb substandard and falsified medicine in the country. 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.
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