Upholding Akunliyi’s legacy at NAFDAC

In order to achieve cheap recognition, some people have elected to misinform Nigerians about past and present activities in NAFDAC. For example, such people, like one Loretta Epuechi, recently went to the media to mischievously allege that the TRUSCAN project in NAFDAC was initiated by the former director-general, the late Prof. Dora Akunyili. While ostensibly […]

In order to achieve cheap recognition, some people have elected to misinform Nigerians about past and present activities in NAFDAC. For example, such people, like one Loretta Epuechi, recently went to the media to mischievously allege that the TRUSCAN project in NAFDAC was initiated by the former director-general, the late Prof. Dora Akunyili. While ostensibly eulogizing Akunyili, the writer sneaked in this misinformation to support her faulty thesis that the fight against fake drugs in Nigeria has stalled. Obviously, if she had credited Orhii with the success of the TRUSCAN project, she would have contradicted her thesis. But the fact is that the success of the TRUSCAN project is the most glaring evidence that Orhii has built upon the successes of Akunyili and raised the bar in the fight against fake drugs.
Orhii’s success story has been so loud that other regulatory agencies in Africa have been coming to understudy the activities of NAFDAC. Sierra Leone is the most recent. In the USA, the Council for Foreign Relations has invited Orhii several times to discuss his success in the use of cutting-edge technologies to fight counterfeiting.
Just as Epuechi noted, Akunyili introduced measures that drastically reduced the incidence of fake drugs from about 68 per cent to 16.7 per cent. But the counterfeiters did not rest on their oars as they devised another means of thwarting the efforts of the agency. They developed a very close imitation of drug packaging to include NAFDAC numbers.  
This was the situation when Orhii came on board in 2009; hence the idea of deploying cutting-edge technologies like TRUSCAN was conceived to fight counterfeiters. The result of this initiative was that counterfeiting dropped from 16.7 per cent in 2005 to 6.4 per cent in 2012. In addition to the TRUSCAN, various other technologies like the Radio Frequency Technology (RFID) and the mobile laboratories were introduced to carry out an on-the-spot testing of drugs at the various entry ports in the country.
It is, therefore, not proper for anybody to attribute these recent achievements in the medicine regulatory agency to someone other than Dr. Paul Orhii, who is currently at the helm of affairs in NAFDAC. The truth is that the legacy the present NAFDAC boss will leave behind will serve as inspiration to his successor.
In conclusion, let me advise those who think like Epuechi to always do a little research on the activities of NAFDAC before writing for public consumption. To put the record straight, the TRUSCAN is a hand-held device for on-the-spot testing of medicines. Medicines tested with this device either pass the test for efficacy or fail. The SMS messaging system, on the other hand, is a mobile system where the public can send short codes on the medicines they are purchasing to an SMS number to verify whether it is fake or genuine.
Cynthia Ikechukwu wrote from  Lagos.