The National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control, South-East zone, has carried out a raid in the Ekumi drug market, Aba, Abia State in search of unregistered and banned products.
The deputy director in charge of monitoring and enforcement and federal task force, South-South South-East, Omoyeni Babatunji, said on Monday the exercise was a national assignment aimed at making the market free from all unwholesome products.
He explained that the assignment, which is an inter-agency collaboration between NAFDAC and security agencies, was going at three different locations in the zone simultaneously.
Babatunde revealed that large quantities of many banned and unregistered products were in the market, adding that the shops in the area would be screened one after the other.
When asked why the agency was searching in the absence of the traders, he said the mandate of NAFDAC “empowers her to enter any premises even by force when it reasonably suspects that things that are in contravention to its regulations are being perpetrated in such a place.”
Babatunde said, “We are here for a national assignment. The South-South and South-East are being coordinated by the Director, South-East Zone. I’m the one in charge of the Aba location. We have three locations where we are working currently and I’m in the Ariaria International Market.
“The scope of our assignment is to search for all the unregistered NAFDAC products in the market. We have been here since morning. What we see here is mind-boggling. We discovered products like Analgn injection and Gentamicin 280mb which have long been banned by the organisation.
“The operation is an inter-agency collaboration. Before we were drafted in, a lot had been done by the DSS and our management, the police and the army. We were drafted in to execute the intelligence.
“We have taken over the market for now. But no arrest has been made because people are not in the market today.”
According to him, any product that does not have a NAFDAC seal means it didn’t go through our processes.
“The management of NAFDAC will make more details of the operation public. The entire area is to be screened according to our mandate. We are being meticulous about it. One by one, we will screen the whole shop. The agency that is working with us will be here until we are done with this assignment,” he said.
