By Hassan Zaggi
The Director-General of National Agency for Food, Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, has declared that members of staff of the agency have been having sleepless nights in an effort to find solution to the Coronavirus scourge.
She disclosed this at a virtual media briefing on Tuesday, saying that “in terms of the COVID, you will not believe what we have done. It was sleepless nights for three to four months.
“Since we never got this type of pandemic – Ebola was completely different, we never got this type of pandemic, so we have to start writing to register this and that.
“Our registration and regulatory directorate worked their backs out. Inspection directorate was restless because people were trying to use that opportunity to bring nonsense into the country. The same thing with investigation and enforcement. The lab, the same thing.
“So, we registered so many products, but we were very rigorous with our registration criteria because we knew that so many people were trying to use that opportunity to bring so many things into the country.
“We have so far registered over 60 products. Before COVID, we had over 170 companies making sanitisers. Some people were selling sanitisers without registration and we went after them. We did nationwide surveillance involving all the 36 states.”
The NAFDAC Director-General, however, disclosed that, concerned by the lack of proper processes of doing clinical trial in Nigeria, NAFDAC has concluded plans to organize a joint training for principal investigators across the country.
She, however, lamented that before she took over the leadership of NAFDAC, clinical trial was literarily dead in Nigeria.
“Clinical trial is huge and it is almost dead when I came. I have put everything in place to ensure that clinical trial is well done.
“In fact, in two days time, there is going to be a joint training for principal investigators across the country.
“We started working with Lagos state ministry of health on chloroquine clinical trial protocol. We did that to make sure that there is no much mistake to start correcting.
“We have reversed the way we conduct clinical trials. We have had a lot of stakeholders meeting. We have written guidelines to help the clinical researcher to know how to navigate the clinically research process, especially our own products.,” she said.
As part of her achievements, Prof. Adeyeye, said that she had successfully boosted the morale of staff of the agency, which was hitherto down.
She noted that apart from ensuring that the staff of the agency gets good allowances, she has liaised with some universities where staff of the agency are studying.
“When I look at a staff, I look at him or her holistically whether he is having job satisfaction. I told them that if a staff is where he was five years ago, then something is wrong with him or maybe NAFDAC is doing something wrong.
“We are working on every way to make our staff motivated. We started developing our staff. We are having a lot of training for the NAFDAC staff”, she stated.
