By Chioma Obinna
As prices of drugs soar in Nigeria, the Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Tunji Alausa on Thursday in Lagos said the federal government is working on drastic measures to end the long sufferings of Nigerians in the hands of multinational pharmaceutical companies.
Alausa who spoke in Lagos during the commissioning of the Federal Medical Centre, Ebute Metta, Lagos’s Clinical building traced the current crisis in the pharmaceutical sector to the activities of pharmaceutical companies who come into our country only to market their products without investing in the sector.
The Minister, who said the problem did not start recently, said the present government has inherited it from previous governments.
He said: “The problem we’ve had is that we’ve let these pharmaceutical companies come into our country. Even in their country, they do things differently. When a company comes in, they give them licenses. You can only market for five years. After five years, you are supposed to manufacture all those drugs in the country. But we just know these multinational companies come in freely. And 20 years after, 30 years after, they’re still marketing. They have not contributed to the development of the country. That’s the problem. We’re going to be busy to change that.”
He said the government will be making new laws and policies, adding that if it means President Bola Ahmed signing an executive order, he will do that to end the suffering of Nigerians.
“We have to make some new laws, some new government policies. And if the president has to sign an executive order, trust me on this, he will do that.”
He said in the interim, the government is currently talking to the local pharmaceutical providers to see what they can do.“Today, I’ll be visiting the federal laboratory in Yaba. We’re trying to convert it to a lab that we can do bioequivalence.
“These are things we need to bring API to get pharmaceutical companies to start making drugs and using activated pharmaceutical products here. Right now, a lot of the things we have is finished pharmaceutical products in our country. So it’s a kind of solution that we’re putting in place,” he stated.
He insisted that President Tinubu wants sustainable, doable, comprehensive healthcare for Nigerians, adding that he the President wants to fix the healthcare system and is working, deploying his time, and resources of the country into our healthcare system.
He said Nigerians should bear with the government as things are getting better.
“We’re working with NAFDAC to reduce the importation of counterfeit drugs into our country. We’re also working with some of the local pharmaceutical companies to increase production. And some of the companies that are planning to leave, we’re talking to them. And we’re also working on various forms of backward integration where we can encourage local manufacturing in our country. As I said, I just had a 30-minute phone call with the Honourable Minister of Trade and Investment in our country. We discussed an expansive plan on how we would strengthen our pharmaceutical industry in Nigeria.”
He further disclosed that the government is mobilising funds for a medical industrialisation program that would involve private-sector funding in Africa and the world.
Continuing, Alausa who disclosed plans to increase production of healthcare workers said by the end of the year, the country will be producing 120,00 nurses annually.
Commenting on the commissioning of the edifice built by the FMC, Ebute Metta, the Minister who expressed satisfaction at the massive projects and healthcare delivery being delivered by the Medical Director, Dr Dadas Adedaramola said: “I’m not going to be one of the choir singers for Ebute Meta but Dr Dada is doing an amazing job. This is one of the best hospitals in the country. This hospital compares to any hospital you go to in the world. And we’re very happy that this is a public hospital, not a private hospital.”
Stating that patients will get good care at the hospital, he said “We’re deploying more resources to infrastructure. We’re deploying more resources to equip the hospital. Getting all hospitals to have CT scans, MRI, digital x-ray, ultrasound.”
Speaking on the National Health Insurance Authority, NHIA, the minister said the government was working towards domesticating it and said the government has launched Sector-wide approach programming that would help in aggregating the resources to reduce the fragmentation that the country currently has.
He said they are mobilising resources from the development partners, together with what we have in the basic healthcare provision fund to ensure enough funds are channelled to the primary healthcare centre and our national health insurance.
“As the president said, every single citizen of Nigeria deserves this.”
Speaking, the Medical Director, Ebutte Metta, Dr Adedaramola Dada who said the building was to expand hospital services explained that the reason they created a new ophthalmology centre was due to the progressive increase in the number of ophthalmology patients that are being seen in the hospital.
Giving insights into the services available in the building, he said the ophthalmology centre has two theatres and four consulting rooms, an IVF Centre designed to crash the cost of IVF in Nigeria.
“On the second floor is a 50-bedded new admission facility and cardiology lab. Some of the things we have done were to now recruit retired health workers who are still very strong, who are still very able, and they have been very useful.
“So those have helped us substantially to reduce the kind of strain we’re having some time in the past. The other thing we want to do while working strongly is for us to continue to provide a very good environment for health workers to practise, such that we will, actually not be losing a very high number of doctors. But as the Minister said, it’s a free world; we’re not going to hold anybody tight”.
Source: Vanguard