‘We are not working in isolation of the law’

including Israel and Lebanon, they said that NAFDAC should chair meetings. It was not because I spoke. Members of my staff, who were not even up to the rank of directors, dominated the meetings. Their contributions were always selected as the best. This also happened at World Health Organisation (WHO) meetings in Geneva, as well […]

including Israel and Lebanon, they said that NAFDAC should chair meetings. It was not because I spoke. Members of my staff, who were not even up to the rank of directors, dominated the meetings. Their contributions were always selected as the best. This also happened at World Health Organisation (WHO) meetings in Geneva, as well as when we attended the annual conference of drug manufacturers in Copenhagen, Denmark.
NAFDAC is seen as a success by national and international stakeholders. Today, we have achieved WHO approval for four pharmaceutical companies in Nigeria. We have submitted relevant documentation to the WHO for six more approvals. If we can get the new approvals, these companies can export their products to other countries. Nigeria will not only become self sufficient in the production of essential drugs, we will also become an exporting country.
When we started the United Nations (UN) Commission for Life Saving cooperatives for women and children about three years ago, no single drug identified to be used in communities was manufactured in Nigeria. Today, I can brag that about four of these products are manufactured here in Nigeria. We have the Chlorhexidine four per cent gel for (umbilical) cord care manufactured here. You know that this drug is important in stemming neonatal deaths because if a baby’s cord is infected, he/she could die.
In those days, out 50 countries involved in the UN programme, only Nepal was producing this drug, but today, Nigeria is producing, and can even export to other countries.
One of the biggest contributors to neonatal deaths is pneumonia, and the best medicine for the treatment of pneumonia is dispersible Amoxicillin tablets. When I was at WHO and said Nigeria could manufacture this drug, people laughed at me because the technology needed to do it is complex. Today, we have the Daily Need (company) in Lagos, which has manufactured dispersible Amoxicillin tablets. Eighteen other companies have also indicated interest in producing this drug. I can tell you that when properly used, this drug can save 17 per cent of children that would have died from pneumonia.
Diarrhea is also of the major causes of deaths among children in Nigeria. The drug for the management of this disease is Zinc Sulfate. Now, we have about three companies that manufacture good Zinc Sulfate in Nigeria. We have Chi Pharmaceuticals, Fidson and some other companies. Also, you know that a major contributor to maternal deaths is postpartum hemorrhage. Women bleed to death; and to prevent deaths we need Oxytocin. And you know that due to our weather, the storage of this drug is a big problem. So we decided to use Misoprostol tablets, which are already being produced in Nigeria. If we have adequate supply of Misoprostol and we teach midwives how to use them for women, we will save mothers during childbirth.
The last National Assembly flayed your failure to remit generated funds to the federation account. How do we reconcile this since you have said you spent generated income to run the agency?
The law that enacted NAFDAC says it can generate money and spend on its business. Now, when you have an overhead cost of N9 billion and the National Assembly gives you N10 million, out of which you receive N7 million at the end of the year, and the law allows you to generate and spend; if you generate income and pay it into the federation account, are you not closing down the agency?
The National Assembly raised this issue repeatedly, and I told them that if they could appropriate the exact money we needed, we would have no need to spend what we generated.
Our diesel cost alone is about N100 million. This is because we have seven laboratories across the country, along with our offices. How then can I run the agency if I only get N7 million each year? My response to the National Assembly was that the law which established NAFDAC protected it from Section 80, Sub-section 1, which says that all the money generated be paid into the consolidated revenue account. I argued that there is an exception in Sub-section 3. The NAFDAC Act is that of the National Assembly. We are not just operating. Some have even argued that the NAFDAC Act was a decree enacted in 1993. But they didn’t take into cognizance the fact that the 1999 constitution came after that decree, and if it saw that this Act was illegal, it would have scrapped it.
There was a law reform in 2004, which qualified what was done by that decree. So, we are legally generating and spending internal revenue. We are not running a lawless agency. If today the law is changed and we remit what we generate to the federal account and we are given the funds we need to effectively run the agency, I will be happier for it. I wouldn’t have to be thinking of how to generate income to run my agency. Let me also tell you that we are not acting in isolation. The US food and drug administration agency, which we are modeled after, is well funded. You can Google their budget. The FDA is funded from what they call user fee and government allocations. In 2012 the US FDA got about $2 billon from collecting user fees; it also got budgetary allocation of $2.36 billon. If you change $4.36 amounts to naira, we are talking about trillions of naira. This fund was for the US FDA to cater for about 300 million Americans. The US FDA has no business with fighting counterfeit drugs. It is the job of the FBI. Here, destruction of seized medicine alone doesn’t come cheap, yet, every year we destroy drugs worth billions of naira.
We spend more than N500 million to prosecute cases each year. Since I came to NAFDAC we’ve had 10 convictions, one of which is the producer of My Pickin teething mixture. We have about 174 million Nigerians, and this means that we are as large as half of America’s population. Many things that happen here are compared with the standards in the US, especially by journalists. You can see how much the US FDA gets. This means that NAFDAC should be getting about N400 billion a year to protect Nigerians. What we generate money from is user fees, just like the Americans. We take N250, 000 to register a drug, and it’s from this money that we will fly to wherever you produce the drug. Imagine what happens when you come from India to register a drug and you pay us and we now pay the money into the federation account, just to wait for it to be allocated back to us. What do we tell someone who has come to register his drug in Nigeria and has paid? He expects us to come to India and inspect his facility. He will be disappointed if we tell him we cannot come over because we don’t have funds. Can you imagine what would have happened during emergencies like that of the My Pickin teething mixture issue, or the recent deaths caused by ogogoro if we didn’t have fund to respond quickly?
However, we pay 25 per cent of the meager sum we generate into the federation account. The law also requires that we return 80 per cent of operative surplus. So when you look at what we need money for, you would say that it is by prudent management that we owe about N4 billion. We don’t owe up to five billion.                             
How much is your budget for the year?
I just mentioned briefly that our budget is made up of three components. We have the personnel budget, which runs to about N4 billion, which is fully taken care by the federal government. The money is remitted directly from the office of the accountant-general to our staff. There is the capital expenditure component this takes a huge chunk. Then there is the overhead expenditure. This also takes a huge chunk because it has to do with things like inspection within and outside the country. There is also the expenditure for media under this component of our budget. We want NTA to make an announcement for us, we pay. We buy chemicals; we train and retrain members of our staff. Everything else comes under the overheard expenditure.
We asked for N9 billion for this component. We were allocated N10 million last year, but got zero allocation this year. How are we supposed to train staff, buy chemicals and diesel with zero allocation? In a nutshell, the federal government takes care of personnel cost while we use what we generate to handle capital and overhead parts of our budget.