The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has declared the Onitsha Bridgehead Drug Market as the central hub for distributing substandard and counterfeit pharmaceuticals across Nigeria and parts of the African sub-region.
This was disclosed by Martins Iluyomade, Southeast zonal director of NAFDAC, at the weekend.
Iluyomade spoke to newsmen after he led officials of NAFDAC to uncover prohibited drugs at the Onitsha Bridgehead Drug Market in Anambra State on Saturday.
According to him, officials of the agency seized two trailers loads of fake and substandard medicines that were hidden inside plumbing material shops.
“We worked on intelligence, this section is a plumbing section and normally it has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals,” Iluyomade said.
“But to our greatest surprise, this place seems to even be the headquarters of pharmaceuticals. We have moved out two trailers of fake and substandard medicines from just a few shops in this place just this morning.
“We have now devised a strategy to allow anybody who is genuinely running his business to come and open his shop for us let us see and all of them have been coming to open their shops for us.
“But we remember sometimes ago, a few years back when we came to do this kind of operation here, our staffs were mobbed, they were attacked and couldn’t carry out that operation.
“Which is the more reasons we said we don’t want crowd here as long as this operation is ongoing.
“This is what we have seen so far. We thought it was going to be a small thing within few hours today but you can see that our work is [not over] even though we heard that some people are trying to plan anything but we advise them not to do that because this is a federal government project and the federal government is right behind what we are doing and it’s of the safety of all Nigerians.”
He added, “Nigerians have cried for a long time. Nigerians have advocated for this for a long time, asking for the cleaning up of the whole system where we have more than half of the drugs in circulation being fake.
“But what we are seeing from here, it’s confirming to us that this place seems to be the headquarters of distribution of substandard and fake pharmaceuticals in the country and even in the African sub-regions.”
Recall that NAFDAC shut down the entire Bridgehead Market in Onitsha after the discovery of fake drugs at the Ogbo Ogwu section of the market.
The agency later revealed on Saturday that about 11,000 shops have been sealed and 40 people arrested in its ongoing nationwide clampdown on substandard and counterfeit medicines.
The Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, disclosed this to journalists in Lagos on Saturday.
