Products with fake pharmaceutical certificates stopped from entering Nigeria, says NAFDAC DG

The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says pharmaceutical products with fake certificates were prevented from entering the country.

At a stakeholders’ engagement meeting on Monday, Mojisola Adeyeye, NAFDAC director-general, had said over 50 percent of the certificates of imported pharmaceutical products (CPP) are fake.

“We found out that more than 50 percent of the CPPs that come into our country are fake. Part of those responsible is our people that go to China or India. And we are going to deal with it,” she said.

Speaking on Wednesday during a Channels Television program, Adeyeye clarified that the agency stopped products with fake CPPs from entering Nigeria through pre-shipment testing.

She said the agency only discovered that the products had fake CPPs after they have been disqualified from importation through the pre-testing.

“If we approved 100 products from a country, the products will undergo clean report analysis before coming into the country,” she said.

“Those that fail will not come in. If they had fake documentation, we couldn’t have known but the products failed testing so they couldn’t come to Nigeria.

“We did a deep dive into the documentation that accompanied those failed products and one of them is the CPP. And we found out that over 50 percent of the documentation was fake.

“This is for the products that didn’t come in. Despite the fact that we approved them based on what we saw, they failed testing.

“So we don’t have over 50 percent of products in Nigeria with fake CPPs. We have about 10 percent which we are trying to reduce to 5 percent.”

Adeyeye said in order the curb the menace of fake certification, NAFDAC would soon digitise the authentication process.

“To authenticate the CPP, we demand that they go to our embassies in the country of export to certify it,” she said.

“There is very likely a doctoring of that certification. What we’re trying to do now is to digitise the authentication.

“Instead of going to our embassy, the authentication will be done virtually. I may be speaking to you from China or India and you’ll be showing me your CPP. All these things will be video-taped.”