Take advantage of AfCFTA, NAFDAC urges pharma companies

Nigerian pharmaceutical companies must be ready for trading their products across the continent with quality products that can be approved in different countries through continental reliance among regulators, the Director General, National Agency for Food Administration and Control, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, has said.

Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye said this was being underscored today because of the African Free Trade Agreement that allowed free trade among African countries.

The AfCFTA is a free trade area, which has 43 parties and another 11 signatories, making it the largest free-trade area by number of member states, after the World Trade Organisation, and the largest in population and geographic size.

Speaking on ‘From Green to Gold: Operational Realities in the 21st Century’ at the 50th anniversary of Daily-Need Industries Limited in Lagos, the NAFDAC boss emphasised that research and development was an important creativity and innovation that several companies would need to incorporate into the manufacturing environment.

Adeyeye, in a statement signed by the NAFDAC Resident Media Consultant, Sayo Akintola, on Sunday, said that this would encourage research and clinical trials of new molecules, immune-modulators, complementary alternative medicines, especially for some non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, amongst others.

She pointed out the need for Nigeria to manufacture vaccines, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and excipients, stressing that until the country had at least five companies making these pharmaceutical ingredients and one or two companies manufacturing vaccines as a starter, it would remain insecure.

Knowing the strides that Daily-Need has made over the last 50 years, she expressed confidence that the diligence, strategic leadership, and the response to challenges through improvement in the manufacturing premise with continuous quality monitoring would generate into a future where innovation and creativity would be embraced for drug and health security as well as the universal health coverage.

She disclosed that Daily Need was one of the companies that were inspected under the NAFDAC/UNIDO cGMP Road Map using international standards, and some of the indicators for that inspection included three for the manufacturing site – premise, equipment, and utilities.

She enthused, ‘’It is good to reminisce about the seed that was sown decades before and how tendering of the green has led to the growth and the golden fruit that it has yielded,’’ she noted, adding that in the pharmaceutical industry or the regulatory world, there was no one-off.

“The tendering of the fruit is a continuous endeavour. Therefore, the sower must be progressive in continuous quality monitoring. Many of our pharmaceutical companies, including Daily-Need, have kept up with this quality monitoring.’’