Revisiting Niprisan: Knowledge is not power until you own it

While I was in Nigeria  few weeks ago, on 31 August 2026, I had a fascinating conversation with Professor Kunle Idowu, Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Ibadan. Our conversation wandered into the subject of polypharmacology, a term increasingly prominent in contemporary pharmaceutical science.

Stripped of its seemingly intimidating nomenclature, the idea is reasonably straightforward. For a long time, an influential model in modern drug discovery was built around the principle of one drug, one target: identify the molecular mechanism responsible for a disease, find a molecule that acts upon it, and attack the problem with precision. But human biology is often rather less accommodating. Many diseases arise from complicated networks of interacting processes. Consequently, increasing attention is being given to drugs capable of acting on several biological targets, and to combinations of compounds that operate through multiple pathways.

Listening to Professor Idowu, I was immediately struck by how familiar the underlying intuition sounded.

As Professor Idowu usefully reminded me, the Yoruba pharmacological imagination has for generations contained expressions such as Awogba: literally, medicine for two hundred ailments. There is also Gbogbo nise, an evocative description for a medicine credited with formidable potency across several conditions. And there is agbo, the broad world of herbal preparations in which multiple plants and ingredients are frequently combined.

Nobody needs to make the argument that Yoruba ancestors had secretly developed twenty-first century molecular pharmacology. Nor does a remedy become efficacious simply because generations of people believed in it. Some traditional medicines work. Some do not. Some may be dangerous. Every therapeutic claim worthy of confidence should be subjected to rigorous investigation for efficacy, toxicity, dosage, interaction and consistency.

But that is precisely the point.

Why was the accumulated medicinal knowledge of African societies so often dismissed rather than investigated?

Colonialism did not merely conquer territory. It established hierarchies of knowledge. European medicine became simply “medicine”. African medicine became “native medicine”, superstition, folklore or the practice of the herbalist. One arrived already clothed in the authority of science; the other had first to prove that it deserved admission into the room.

Therein lies one of the enduring pathologies of African intellectual life: the tendency to wait for external permission to know.

Traditional Chinese medicine offers an instructive contrast. China did not modernise by committing epistemic suicide. It preserved substantial elements of its inherited medical traditions while subjecting them to systematic research, modern scientific tools and increasing standardisation. Today, the scientific literature routinely discusses Chinese medicine through ideas such as multi-component, multi-target and multi-pathway action. Network pharmacology, systems biology, artificial intelligence and multi-omics are now being deployed to investigate mechanisms once dismissed as too complicated for the dominant pharmacological paradigm.

There is a lesson here much bigger than medicine.

Epistemic confidence does not mean believing everything our ancestors believed. It means refusing to assume that an idea becomes worthy of investigation only after somebody in London, Boston or Beijing gives it an impressive name.

Africa must acquire the confidence to take its own knowledge seriously enough to test it.

But there is another side to this story, and perhaps an even more troubling one. What happens when Africans possess the knowledge, subject it to scientific investigation, develop the product and establish its value, but still lack the institutional and commercial machinery to own the opportunity?

Welcome to the extraordinary story of Niprisan.

Niprisan was developed by Nigeria’s National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, NIPRD, drawing from traditional medicinal knowledge associated with the treatment of sickle cell disease. Researchers investigated the formulation, conducted scientific evaluation and clinical work, and secured intellectual property protection.

Think about that for a moment.

The indigenous knowledge was here.

The researchers were here.

The scientific development happened here.

The intellectual property originated here.

And yet translating that accomplishment into sustained pharmaceutical production and commercial value proved extraordinarily difficult.

READ ALSO: What next for African universities and knowledge production system?

NIPRD reportedly explored possibilities with Nigerian pharmaceutical companies but encountered precisely the institutional weakness that continues to haunt African innovation: insufficient appetite and capability for the expensive journey from promising research to scalable commercial product.

Eventually, the American company XeChem obtained an exclusive licence in 2002 to commercialise Niprisan. The arrangement was not, as the most sensational version of the story might suggest, simply a case of Americans arriving with a suitcase of dollars and stealing a Nigerian patent. NIPRD retained an economic interest through an upfront payment and royalties, and local Nigerian production was envisaged. The resulting product, branded Nicosan, received Nigerian regulatory approval in 2006.

But the venture subsequently encountered production, financing and managerial difficulties, and XeChem eventually collapsed.

That complexity makes the Niprisan story more useful, not less.

Because the real scandal is not that foreigners recognised value in Nigerian knowledge.

The scandal is that Nigeria did not already possess an ecosystem sufficiently powerful to carry one of its own promising pharmaceutical innovations all the way from indigenous knowledge to laboratory, from laboratory to factory, and from factory to global market.

This is the economics of epistemic timidity.

Africa has spent decades discussing knowledge production while paying insufficient attention to knowledge ownership.

Universities celebrate publications. Governments celebrate research institutes. Academics count citations. Conferences end with photographs, communiqués and promises of collaboration. Brilliant researchers produce prototypes. Inventors win prizes. Then comes the notorious valley between discovery and commercialisation, and too many African ideas fall into it.

Knowledge is not power merely because Francis Bacon said so.

Knowledge can liberate the mind and transform society long before it generates a kobo. But when the question is who captures economic value, builds industries and exercises technological power, knowledge must also be protected, financed, scaled, manufactured and deployed.

A scientific discovery sitting indefinitely inside a university laboratory is knowledge, certainly. But the company that patents its applications, attracts investment, develops manufacturing capacity, builds distribution networks and sells the resulting products across continents possesses something more: economic power.

This is why the discussion about African knowledge production must move beyond universities.

Africa needs venture capital willing to finance deep technology and life sciences. It needs pharmaceutical companies with the ambition to develop original products rather than merely import active ingredients and manufacture generics. It needs stronger technology-transfer offices in universities. It needs patent expertise, regulatory capability, clinical-trial infrastructure, sophisticated laboratories and patient capital willing to wait years rather than months for returns.

Governments matter enormously here. Almost every technologically advanced economy has relied at crucial moments upon the state to absorb risk, finance research, nurture emerging industries or create markets for innovation. But private African capital must also undergo a transformation of imagination.

There is money on the continent.

The question is what it considers worthy of investment.

African billionaires will finance hotels, luxury apartments, shopping centres, oil trading and imported consumer goods. All have their place. But how many are willing to place patient capital behind a molecule developed at Ibadan, a diagnostic technology emerging from Lagos, or a biotechnology platform coming out of Nairobi?

A continent cannot consume its way into technological sovereignty.

Nor should African universities regard commercialisation as something vaguely indecent, as though knowledge becomes contaminated once it encounters the marketplace. There is nothing intellectually noble about producing knowledge whose economic value is systematically harvested elsewhere.

The lesson of Niprisan is therefore larger than one medicine.

Africa faces three related tasks. The first is epistemic confidence: believing that African societies are legitimate sites from which important knowledge can originate. The second is scientific rigour: testing that knowledge fearlessly rather than either dismissing or romanticising it. The third is commercial agency: constructing institutions capable of capturing the value that knowledge creates.

Fail at the first and Africans abandon their ideas.

Fail at the second and they confuse sentiment with science.

Fail at the third and somebody else builds the industry.

For generations, Africans have been told that knowledge is power.

The Niprisan story compels an important amendment.

Knowledge is not power until you own it.