NAFDAC to clamp down on drug hawkers in FCT ― Official

MRS Clementina Anyakora, Director, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), FCT, says the agency will begin to clamp down drug hawkers in the FCT.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that Anyakora disclosed this in an interview in Ibadan on Friday while speaking on the enforcement activities of the agency.

She said that the agency has identified areas where drug hawking was predominant in the FCT.

“We want to do a lot of work on drug hawking and hawkers at the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

“We find out some individuals hawk drug products; in fact, it is one of the things we are working on in terms of enforcement.

“Also, we have the survey bakery facilities and we want to find out the quality of bread people eat.

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“There is this ban substance called Potassium Bromate that is not allowed in bread, but we heard that some bakers use it.

“We are doing a survey of all the bakeries in the FCT, we will carry out appropriate sanctions against erring companies,” she said.

Anyakora said that FCT has over 2,500 companies comprising of food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices among other regulated products.

“The bulk of NAFDAC work is good for safety in the FCT; so we have intensified on regulatory procedures.

“We have also heard about those selling codeine, though we are yet to confirm.

“We have drug abuse education in schools; we have written to the FCT school management for permission to hold sensitisation programme.

“It is better to catch them at a young age before they get addicted to these products.”

She further added that the decentralisation of the registration process by the agency has increased the number of companies that registered for certain kind of products.

The director said that NAFDAC had three series of approval from last quarter in 2018 to the first quarter of 2019; people are quite happy that they got registered quickly.

“We have many small industries springing up in FCT; it is fast growing as a manufacturing area, with the policy of ease of doing business and the zonal registration.

“With the quality management system that the agency is entrenching and standard operating procedures, we need to get FCT to the top,” she said.