There have been allegations of financial recklessness and frivolous awards of contracts against you. Why did you embark on such adventures?
The allegations are false; we did not award frivolous contracts. We have not indulged in reckless spending as claimed. Take a look at the person making the allegations, the former director of finance and administration. He is the person who has been making the payments for the past three to four years. Then suddenly when he was reassigned, he woke up to discover that there were irregularities. But all the paper works are there to show that contract awards followed due process. All the allegations of financial recklessness are false.
Of course, it is very easy to find out when someone says that I award contracts to my own companies, it is very easy to go to the Corporate Affairs Commission. Luckily, he provided the name of the companies, so you can go and look through it and see if there is any relative of mine in any of the companies that were mentioned. Look at the Board of Directors, signatures and names to see if any of my relatives or I have anything to do with any of these companies.
In a petition that is online, it was alleged that the cost of furniture installation in Isolo office of the agency was inflated to N270m from less than N180m, how did that happen?
That contact followed due process and two external auditors evaluated the worth of the contract and they submitted their report to the Ministry of Health because the contract was above the approval limit of NAFDAC’s tenders board. It was approved by the ministerial tender board before it was awarded and this same director coordinated that event only to turn around to say that it was inflated. So if he inflated it, then, he is the one that knows best how to explain it. But to the best of my knowledge, that contract went through all due process before it was awarded.
It was also alleged that a sum of N400m was removed from the purse of the agency between March 2013 and December 2014, how true is that?
He said it was for the purchase of chemicals; if purchase of chemicals is illegal, well I don’t know. I am not also aware of any illegal withdrawal. He was the one who was actually paying the funds. If he knew that these were illegal withdrawals, why didn’t he talk about it or draw my attention to it?
Sometimes, when we have emergencies, we have to pay to get chemicals. It is not totally strange for NAFDAC to buy chemicals because it is from our laboratory that we get most of our income. Usually, we buy chemicals, and laboratory analysis of our products is a major source of income to NAFDAC.
The former finance director also claimed that the sum of N4bn was fraudulently withdrawn from NAFDAC’s coffers in the last four years for fictitious advertisements, are you saying this is not true as well?
Advertisements are not fictitious. We are present on four television channels. For "NAFDAC and your Health" programme, I don’t believe that there is any Nigerian that does not know about it because it runs on four television stations. Since I came to NAFDAC, we have been airing at prime periods on AIT, NTA, CHANNELS TV and BEN TV in Europe. The payments we made to these channels are verifiable.
Realising that TV may not be accessible to everybody, we have "NAFDAC and your Health" on radio that is aired in all the states across the country. I do not think that is waste of public funds or frivolous withdrawals because this is how we reach members of the public. We carry out public awareness campaigns, we work with members of the National Youth Service Corps, we have a youth corps members CDS that particularly targets NAFDAC’s activities and we have to print T-Shirts, lecture materials to give to these people. We have NAFDAC year book, we have the annual report on NAFDAC, we have NAFDAC news that we print and sometimes, we are featured in magazines. Sometimes we advertise some of our activities on TV and magazines. For example, the popular text and scratch method to tell Nigerians how to authenticate their drugs, the programme itself costs us nothing but you have to educate the people on how to be able to authenticate medicines. We have our messages running on buses. We have our messages in newspapers. If you open most magazines in Nigeria, we take the prime space, sometimes it is cover page, sometimes middle page to advertise these and they are not free, neither do I believe these are waste of public funds.
The difference between regulation in developing countries like Nigeria and developed countries like America is the fact that most people here are largely ignorant. They do not know even the right thing. In a developed country, they look at the product, the expiry date and even the company before they buy. Here, if you do not use the media to educate the masses, people sometimes even believe that the counterfeiter is the one helping them to get drugs at a cheaper rate, they do not know that taking a counterfeit product can be more expensive and might even cost them their lives. We had to engage traditional rulers, the entertainers and right now, Tu Face Idibia is our NAFDAC ambassador and all these things are not free.
The director in question has been there over the past four years. He has been the one approving and actually making all the payments. So for him to wake up one day and become an overnight whistle blower when he was redeployed to a different directorate because of his incompetence and corrupt tendencies speaks volume.
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Could all what you have enumerated here be the reason why the debt profile of NAFDAC has hit about N5bn?
We have that level of debt profile because of our prudent management of resources. NAFDAC regulates a population of 170 million people and we are one of the top 20 medicine regulatory agencies in the world. The US Foods and Drugs Administration in 2012 generated $2bn; the Congress appropriated additional sum of about $2.36bn that was released. At the end of the year, they had another supplementary $150m. If you look at that together, it comes to more than $4.5bn. If you convert that at the current exchange rate, it is more than N1trn. If you extrapolate and believe that the life of a Nigerian is as good as the life of an American
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