The Senate Committee on Health on Monday summoned the Minister of Trade and Investment, Niyi Adebayo; Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire; and the Director-General of National Agency for Food and Drug Administration (NAFDAC), Mojisola Adeyeye over the inability of the Ministry of Trade and Investment to implement the Backward Integration Policy (BIP) on local production of syringes five years after it was validated.
Members of the committee also criticised NAFDAC for licensing companies in India and China to import syringes into the country.
The chairman of the committee, Ibrahim Oloriegbe (APC, Kwara) issued the summon at a public hearing on: “They need to regulate the manufacturing, importation and use of syringes and needles to protect the lives and safety of Nigerians as well as the economy of the country.”
Oloriegbe lamented that licensing agents outside Nigeria to import syringes was wrong and unacceptable.
He said despite the capacity of the local firms to meet the market demands, an estimated over 1 billion units per annum of syringe and needles were being imported into the country making the country lose the huge foreign exchange.
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“You can’t keep licensing agents outside Nigeria to import syringes, while local firms are dying. There is no complexity in the production of syringes,” Oloriegbe said.
The committee, therefore, mandated the Trade and Investment Minister to appear before it on April 15, 2021, to explain reasons the Backward Integration Policy (BIP), which was validated in 2017, had not been presented to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) for approval.
It also mandated NAFDAC to furnish the committee with the list of companies that had been importing syringes into the country in the last 15 years, the quantity imported, evidence of checks on licensed foreign companies and licensing fees.
The committee further directed Ehanire to explain why public-own hospitals were not using locally-manufactured syringes.
Meanwhile, the President of the Medical Device Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MEDMAN), Akin Oyediran said all the seven licensed local manufacturers had the potential to produce 2.4 billion units of syringes per annum if provided with a favourable business environment.
According to him, “The syringes needed in Nigeria is between 2 billion to 2.5 billion annually. All seven local manufacturers can produce 1.95 billion a year. But if we have the support of the government, especially the implementation of the Backward Integration Policy, they will scale up and would be able to produce all the demands in a matter of months. The quality is world-class. The quality is not questionable.
“The issue is not how much losses we have incurred, but how much we are exposing Nigerians to substandard syringes coming into the country.”
