“Igbo Civilisation Has Reached Ile-Ife And Other Yoruba Parts. That’s Why You See Igbo Prefixes And Suffixes In Names. Igbo Has 13 States In The South, Down To The Coast”
— An Igbo king
Fake products are a silent national killer, and government must treat them as the emergency they are. The manufacture, importation, packaging, and open-market sale of fake drugs, adulterated drinks, substandard cosmetics, fake toothpaste, contaminated water, and other counterfeits is a documented, large-scale problem.
NAFDAC has repeatedly raided major open markets (Idumota in Lagos, Onitsha, Ariaria in Aba and others), seizing and destroying goods valued at well over ₦1.5 trillion in coordinated operations, with more than 137 truckloads in one major 2025 exercise alone.
The human cost is staggering. UNODC and related estimates indicate that falsified and substandard medicines contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths annually across sub-Saharan Africa, including roughly 267,000 linked to fake or poor-quality antimalarials and up to around 169,000 children dying from severe pneumonia treated with substandard antibiotics.
Nigeria ranks among the worst affected countries for counterfeit trade. These products do not discriminate: they harm the children of the very communities producing or selling them, as well as everyone else. Legitimate manufacturers lose markets, government loses revenue, and the health system absorbs avoidable deaths and antimicrobial resistance.
Yet when enforcement hits markets or networks with strong ethnic concentrations, the reaction from some quarters is often defensive tribalism rather than outrage at the crime. The same voices that demanded nuance on terrorism labeling suddenly treat scrutiny of counterfeiting as an attack on “our people.”
This is the hypocrisy. An average Nigerian remains more loyal to ethnicity and religion than to the shared national interest. Crimes that can be framed as external or “the other” draw fierce condemnation; crimes that implicate one’s own group are minimized, explained away, or ignored even when the victims include one’s own children.
President Bola Tinubu and the Federal Government should declare a formal national emergency on fake, counterfeit, falsified, and substandard products. This is not ordinary regulatory work; it is a public-health, economic, and security crisis.
No group should be exempt. Innocent traders and manufacturers of every ethnicity must be protected while those deliberately flooding markets with dangerous goods face the full weight of the state. Citizens, for their part, should stop rushing to ethnic defense whenever enforcement arrives and instead demand results that save Nigerian lives.
The standard must be consistent: name the crime, pursue the perpetrators, and put the nation first. Anything less is just another form of the double standard that has held Nigeria back. The selective sensitivity and tribal double standards must end.
Public Alert!!!
An imported tomato paste product found at Bowa Market, Onitsha was carrying fake NAFDAC registration number belonging to a sachet water product.
This is one of the deceptive practices we are working to eliminate.
During a recent enforcement operation, NAFDAC officers discovered and intercepted the imported tomato paste, which falls under Nigeria's import prohibition.
Beyond violating import regulations, the misuse of a NAFDAC registration number is a deliberate attempt to mislead consumers into believing a product has regulatory approval.