NAFDAC DG Speaks On Slow Product Registration, Laments Inadequate Staff 

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has given reasons for the delay in registration of products.

The Director-General of the agency, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, in an interview on Channels TV on Wednesday highlighted the shift from manual to digital registration as a major reason for the delay. She also pointed out that the agency does not have enough staff for its operations as it only has 2,000 staff for Nigeria’s 200 million population.

She stated, “When I got to NAFDAC, we weren’t digitising; that led to a lot of person to person contact and a lot of compromise, corruption. So we started digitising, and when you do digitisation you have volume 1, volume 2 and we even for those that went to school, some are stock when it comes to the use of computer.

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“When you now see that we have MSMEs (Micro, Small and Medium scale Enterprises), we started that in 2017 and we have thousands of them, that is where our challenges has been because we want to assist them to register. It used to be manual and then there were compromises, and I wanted to eliminate that, and it’s a process. However, the fact is that sometimes our registration is slow.”

On the adequacy of staff, Adeyeye said despite struggling with manpower shortage the agency was doing well.

“NAFDAC works very well. However, we need more staff. We have only 2,000 staff for over 200 million Nigerians, which is also part of the problem,” she added.

Regarding the availability of adequate equipment for the agency, Adeyeye said, “We got 40 pieces of TruScan for detecting fake medicines. We have used it to identify substandard drugs. However, the quantity aspect of it needs a lot of chemometrics; our staff are currently undergoing that training.

“We had 72 scanners in mind, two per state, and then distributed around the ports and borders, but we could buy only 40 due to the naira devaluation.”