The rejection of food exports from Nigeria in some European countries and the United States may soon become a thing of the past if collaboration between the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and other government agencies at the ports is strengthened.
At the commissioning of the NAFDAC office complex for the Murtala Muhammed International Airport/Nigerian Aviation Handling Company Plc (NAHCO) in Lagos, the agency’s Director General, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye lamented that over 70 per cent of food exports from Nigeria are rejected abroad with huge financial losses to the exporters and the country at large.
A statement on Sunday by NAFDAC’s Resident Media Consultant, Mr. Sayo Akintola quoted the DG as saying that the deplorable state of export trade facilitation for regulated products leaving the country has continued to be a serious cause for concern for her Agency, adding that a trip to NAFDAC export warehouses within the international airport would explain unequivocally the major reason for the continuous rejection of Nigerian exports abroad.
She, however, noted that the agency was responding to the challenge by initiating a collaborative adventure with government agencies at the Ports towards ensuring that goods are of requisite quality and meet the regulatory requirements of the importing countries and destinations before they are packaged and hauled to the ports for shipment.
She said there was need for a more enhanced regulation of export – packaging, pre-shipment testing and certification – to provide some quality assurance and to minimize rejects.
To save Nigeria’s reputation in international commerce, Adeyeye called on all stakeholders in the export trade to see her position as a call to duty and collaborate with NAFDAC for the sake of the country and its collective future.
“The mandate to safeguard the health of the populace through ensuring that food, medicines, cosmetics, medical devices, chemicals, and packaged water are safe, efficacious and of the right quality in an economy that is overwhelmingly dependent on importation of the bulk of its finished products and raw materials could never have been actualized without effective presence of NAFDAC at the ports and land borders’’, she said.
She recalled the agency push “through the resilience of the past Director, Prof. Samson Adebayo on assumption of duties, for the immediate return of NAFDAC to the ports that eventually happened in May 2018’’, stressing that ‘”with gratitude for the approval of the President and the various arms of the government, the results of our presence at the ports are available for everyone to see’’.
The NAFDAC DG, commended the Nigeria Customs Service for the symbiotic relationship that exists between its management and her agency, saying, “without the Customs, we will not be able to do a lot of what we have been able to do. The collaboration between the Customs and NAFDAC is huge. NAFDAC is a complex organisation. We are scientific. We work with the Police and we work with Directorate of State Services. We work with Interpol and Federal Bureau of Investigation because of the few stakeholders that are unscrupulous. NAFDAC collaborates with Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Services to ensure that due diligence is done because over 70 per cent of the products that leave our ports get rejected. Considering the money spent on getting those products out of the country, it is a double loss for both the exporter and the country.
‘’Without the Police, we cannot do much in terms of investigation and enforcement. We have over 80 policemen with us in NAFDAC. They help us a lot when we are doing raids or investigations as the case may be’’.
In pursuit of its mandate, Adeyeye explained that the agency embarked on the optimisation and customisation of its processes, stating that the Ports Inspection Data-Capture and Risk Management System (PIDCARMS) is presently deployed in all of the nation’s ports and land borders to automatically capture and process data for imported regulated products from the Nigeria Customs Information System.
The DG said the agency is also working assiduously with relevant stakeholders towards implementation of traceability for pharmaceuticals in Nigeria, recalling that a traceability pilot was conducted successfully for COVID-19 vaccines’ distribution and a scale-up is being done as soon as feasible for medicines and other regulated products.
‘’The Traceability Information System was developed from PIDCARMS, which underscores the integrative system of NAFDAC. These efforts will further boost our regulatory oversight in monitoring the importation and distribution of medicines to ensure that spurious, substandard, and falsified (fake and counterfeit) products are minimized and are eventually blocked out from our supply chain’.
‘’Similarly, our Post-marketing Surveillance initiatives that involve the Ports Inspection Directorate are gaining global recognition, and we intend to do much more for our nation, especially for future generations’’, she said, adding that the agency has extended the frontiers of the fight against substandard products through the procurement of more Truscan devices to further boost on-spot checks for quality of products at the ports, shops, market spaces and anywhere else.
According to Adeyeye, NAFDAC under her leadership, as a customer-focused agency, has “steadily engaged in improving service delivery in the course of carrying out our mandate as enshrined in the NAFDAC Act Cap N1 Laws of the Federation of Nigeria (LFN) 2004, which empowers us among others, to regulate and control the manufacture, importation, exportation, distribution, advertisement, sale and use of food, drugs, cosmetics, chemicals, medical devices and packaged water (known as regulated products)’’.
She said these efforts had paid off as NAFDAC has recently been recognised as a world class regulator, with the conferment of the WHO ML3 Status and with continuous improvement of its processes and procedures progressing towards becoming a WHO Listed regulatory Authority (WLA) status to the satisfaction of our customers.
In a bid to deliver on its mandate in spite of the various challenges, Adeyeye said: “We have spent the last few years of my first tenure in the onerous task of building new and upgrading obsolete infrastructure to make them befit to our status, and to provide a safe and comfortable working environment for our staff for maximum output’’.
According to her, the NAHCO office complex is one of the two facilities commissioned same day as part of her efforts to position the agency as a regulator that is fully equipped to undertake its regulatory oversight in compliance with global best practices.
Earlier in the day, she commissioned the Ogun State NAFDAC office complex in Abeokuta amid pomp and ceremony. Seven NAFDAC state office complexes had been completed across the country in the last five years, while many others are at different stages of completion.
The NAHCO complex presently houses fully equipped and befitting office spaces for staff, some of whom run a 24-hour surveillance service, a Press/Conference room that can sit 40 persons, a temporary mini-warehouse equipped with temperature-sensitive storage facility, as well as light-duty vehicular equipment for safely moving items till such are ready for release or seizure for destruction.
“My heart broke one day in early 2018 when our former director of Port Inspection Directorate sent me a picture of our staff at the Apapa port working from inside their car with a big umbrella because it was raining so that clients can come in and take care of their business. I was shocked’’, Adeyeye said in a voice laden with grief, stressing that “with this monumental edifice with maximum comfort and tools, all that has become a thing of the past for our staff’’.
