The Dora times

She was on a lecture tour to my school at the height of her headship of the food and drug regulator NAFDAC (National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control).For an undergraduate still learning the ways of the country and all his children, I had one lesson to learn: you didn’t meet Dora (as […]

She was on a lecture tour to my school at the height of her headship of the food and drug regulator NAFDAC (National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control).
For an undergraduate still learning the ways of the country and all his children, I had one lesson to learn: you didn’t meet Dora (as she is more famously known); Dora happened to you.
Thousands of students thronged out an auditorium just to hear her speak, and they weren’t disappointed. Nobody knew hearing about fake drugs and counterfeit medicines could be mesmerising.
Dora made the topic a humdinger, riding a wave of personal tragedy. Her sister had died, one more victim of the consequences of fake drugs, she said. She made it her life’s duty—when she was head of the agency—to stamp out fakes, deal with unregulated open markets and bring sanity into Nigeria’s drug distribution system.
She used the media exactly the way she used her personal stories. Every serious news bulletin had Dora as one of three major headlines, right next to news out of Aso Rock Villa.
“She was in the news so much, so I wanted to know who/what she was before and outside NAFDAC,” says radio broadcaster Deba Ologbosere, explaining the start of her research into the woman. “She was interesting.”
Ologbosere doesn’t recall much about NAFDAC other than what her news bulletins contained.
“I don’t think I read or had heard much about before her time.”
NAFDAC was simply an agency of the federal health ministry, but Dora was more known and heard than the minister.
Through grabbing sound bites on radio, moving pictures on television and column inches of vitriol against fake drugs in newspapers, Madam NAFDAC was a voice of conscience in every living room, every beer parlour.
“A counterfeiter is worse than an armed robber,” she used to say. “At least an armed robber gives you a choice: your money or your life. But a counterfeiter doesn’t: he takes both your money and your life.”
Her words struck notes and more notes with the public. Before her, not many knew what the acronym NAFDAC stood for.
When Dora was through with NAFDAC, many still didn’t know what the name meant, but they sure knew what the agency did and stood for.
“NAFDAC number” became a buzzword; the country learnt to be conscious of expiry dates, of NAFDAC registration numbers, of manufacture dates and manufacturer’s address.
But the job was dangerous, and its success resonated with her enemies. Once she mentioned escaping an assassin’s bullet (the one that famously went through her headgear).
That consciousness lingered till Dora went on to a new—more herculean and impossible—job as information minister. And then it turned another colour.
In the shuffle to appoint new ministers, public thought assumed she was shoo-in for health minister. But her position on the cabinet as information and communications minister was anticlimactic.
She attacked it with the same passion, but the narrative was no longer neat as a whistle. Gone were the money-or-life analogy for fake drugs. In came the murky language of politics and bureaucracy.
Her NAFDAC days outshone her ministerial days, inasmuch as the latter threatened to eclipse the former. At the same time, it is unclear how much she faded after NAFDAC.
“There were complaints she became government’s voice,” says Ologbosere. “People don’t like it when their favourite person tilts to government’s side.”
Dora didn’t like it either. She constantly battled redtape to explain what was cached in official government speak.
As information minister, she was also Nigeria’s launderer, and the linen was so sullied with inefficiency, bureaucracy, corruption—all items which earned the country bottom positions on Transparency International’s ranking.
Dora opted for a new word in Nigerian psyche: Rebranding. The jingles and adverts slots were immense. It was all the image, and optics was king.
She wanted to change the packaging of Nigeria, author Rabiah Labaran explained in her book Saving Nigeria Through You.
“But all of us know quite well that changing the name of something does not necessarily mean the content of that thing is also renewed.”
Her success there is still debatable. A trying time surrounded the ill health and subsequent death of her then boss, late President Umar  Yar’Adua.
The secrecy that shrouded his illness and death caused immense dissatisfaction between Dora and the President’s men. Her resignation was unexpected, but Nigerians took it as a sign that their woman couldn’t abide much nuisance.
After all, what political office holder has ever willingly resigned office despite the depth and stink of controversy? But her foray into elective politics big-time was even more controversial and far removed from the academic background she portrayed.
The first time Lawrence Isaiah heard Dora on TV—the only medium through which he knew her—he saw “she was an open-minded person,” he says. “Strong-willed too. I, however, did not like her dabbling into politics.”
Dora came across as not the sort of person to do great on election. Not many thrive on votes. She thrived on passion, conviction, energy and dynamism to push a dream.
She all but disappeared for a while. When she reappeared in photos leading to the start of the National Conference, the images sparked debate about her health or ill health.
In typical fashion, she rode out the controversy, admitted she had been ill but was recovering, pointed out the emaciated figure she cast on the floor of the Confab was not forever. The palour would be lost to gloss, she reasoned, and the bones will grow flesh back on.
Most importantly, she insisted, she would continue what would be her final task as a delegate to the all-important conference, where Nigeria’s next moves are being decided.
She wouldn’t complete that last assignment. In days, she was flown out on medical emergency. Days later, her death shocked the country and caused an outpouring of condolences on social and traditional media.
The flurry of emotion from those who knew her and those who didn’t compels me to reshape the last image of her—not the photos of a pale, skinny woman who made tongues wag even in life as in death. It is one more stately, complete with rounded cheeks and gap-toothed smile, pumping hands with Gen Yakubu Gowon at a public service award.