The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says it is ready to partner with the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC), noting the impact of the agency on Nigerian youths when it was not manning the country’s ports.

NAFDAC director-general Moji Adeyeye stated this in Abuja when the NCTC national coordinator, Adamu Laka, visited her office. Ms Adeyeye thanked the Office of the National Security Adviser for returning NAFDAC to the ports in 2018.

“So many things were going wrong. Anything bad was coming into Nigeria in terms of drugs, precursors, whatever. Tramadol was rampant in the country. At a point, I told my ports inspection director whether they were targeting Nigeria to erase us from the map.

“Our young people were getting mad. Suicide bombing was at the peak. I said do we really know what we are doing? NAFDAC is in charge of drugs. We are in charge of chemicals and NAFDAC was removed from the ports for seven years.

“That is part of why terrorism became big in the country. I always refer to the Office of the National Security Adviser as one of the agencies that helped us to go back to the ports.”

Ms Adeyeye said a partnership between the two strategic agencies in the country was apt for safeguarding the lives of Nigerians. She said NAFDAC was suitably positioned to fight drug counterfeiting, drug abuse, unwholesome food and unauthorised handling of chemicals fuelling terrorist operations and other criminal activities in the country.

According to her, NAFDAC, a World Health Organisation Maturity Level 3 Regulatory Authority, has highly qualified experts and well-equipped laboratories.

She, however, said the agency needed more personnel to cope with its enormous responsibilities.

“As a regulatory agency, we are supposed to have 12,000 staff but we are barely 2,000 in a country of more than 230 million. NAFDAC staff work round the clock. We are not just a civil service organisation but a regulatory body that is mandated to protect lives on a daily basis from food to drugs, to water, precursors and chemicals that can fall into the hands of the terrorists,” she said.

She commended the relentless efforts of the NCTC to support the return of NAFDAC to the ports and pledged that NAFDAC would continue to work with the Office of the National Security Adviser.

(NAN)