By Collins Opurozor
I saw a report in today’s Saturday Sun newspaper that should worry every Nigerian. It is about the pandemic of fake products sweeping through our markets, and how panic is spreading with it. Bleach is now being used to whiten fufu. Dye is being poured into red oil to fake its colour. Fake drugs, fake food, fake everything, all sitting on the shelves we buy from every day. Read that again. The food many of us ate this morning may have simply poisoned our bodies and terminally exposed our organs to failure. That is what Nigerians are doing to their fellow citizens right now.
A friend in Owerri once told me that he went to four different locations in a day to drink a particular beer. Each of the four bottles he was served tasted different from the other, and they all tasted different from the original beer. They all came from four different fakers!
Let us be clear about one thing first: Nigerian laws appear inadequate to deal with this. NAFDAC appears handicapped, too. The Counterfeit and Fake Drugs Act exists, but what penalties does it prescribe? Just this month, the agency’s own Director-General, Professor Mojisola Adeyeye, stood before journalists and called counterfeiters “merchants of death.” She begged for death penalty against them. You see, when the head of the very agency meant to protect us is the one begging for harsher laws, you know the legislative bodies have not done enough.
NAFDAC says it destroyed over N1.5 trillion worth of fake products in the past year alone, and secured 64 convictions. A mere 64 convictions against a criminal industry worth trillions? That is not enough. It is like a mosquito bite on an elephant. Something is clearly broken, whether it is corruption, inadequate laws, weak judiciary, poor surveillance, weak regulatory frameworks, or all of them. Whatever it is, it must be fixed, and fixed fast.
Let us not deceive ourselves: a man who mixes bleach into fufu and sells it to a family knowing it could kill their child is not a petty trader. He is a killer. He should be treated as one. The wicked deserve no mercy. If the law must go all the way to capital punishment to make that point, so be it.
Walk into any major hospital in the Southeast today and ask the doctors what they are seeing. They will tell you the truth, even if it breaks your heart. The wards are filling up with young people, not the elderly, battling kidney and liver failure. Twenty-somethings. Thirty-somethings. People who should be starting careers and families are instead hooked up to dialysis machines, fighting for their lives. Medical studies coming out of our own Southeast now put chronic kidney disease at nearly one in every eight people examined, and liver disease is climbing just as fast, with cancer and cirrhosis now dominating hospital liver wards in Enugu and some other states. This is not old age catching up with anybody. This is what happens when a whole population has been quietly poisoned through what it eats and drinks, for years, without knowing it. Call it what it is: a national health emergency. And that emergency must be declared now!
Only recently, a heartbreaking scene played out in Enugu. Okwulora, a philanthropist, gathered a large crowd of kidney patients seeking help, some arriving in wheelchairs, others visibly weakened, with swollen faces and legs from a disease that should not be this common among the young. It was the kind of sight that makes you go quiet. And it is becoming familiar. Scroll through social media on any given week and you will find another appeal, another young man or woman needing money for dialysis, another family begging strangers for help because a hospital bill has become a matter of life and death. These are not isolated stories anymore. They are a pattern, and patterns deserve serious action, not just tears and alms.
It is important to commend everyone behind these fundraising efforts. Truly, I do commend them. Every naira raised is a life given a little more time. But we cannot keep mopping the floor while the tap keeps running. The real fight has to move upstream, to the markets, the factories, the backyard laboratories where poison is being dressed up as food. Civil society groups and activists in the Southeast, where this problem appears worst, need to turn some of their energy toward exposing these operations, not only comforting the victims afterward.
Again, genuine manufacturers also have a role to play. Any company whose brand is being counterfeited should have people, product monitoring teams, whose full-time job is to walk through markets and malls checking whether what is being sold under their name is really theirs. And alongside all of this, we need a serious, sustained conversation about what we eat, about the dangers of cheap, synthetic, heavily processed food, the kind that fills our markets because it is fast and affordable, never mind what it is doing to our bodies.
We talk about insecurity every single day, and rightly so. We talk about road accidents, and rightly so too. But I now believe, very strongly, that fake products may be killing more Nigerians every year than both of those combined, and almost nobody is saying it loudly enough. That should frighten us more than it currently does. This conversation needs to leave the pages of the newspapers and enter our National Assembly and State Assemblies. Those who make products that kill our brothers and sisters are killers. They deserve to die. We need that law in Nigeria with the urgency of now!
