How 12,000 pounds earned Dora Akunyili NAFDAC DG job

Through a reputation of honesty and incorruptibility, Dr Dora Akunyili, earned the trust and confidence that secured her the job as the Director General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC). Her major task when she was appointed in 2001 by then President Olusegun Obasanjo was to wage war against counterfeit drug barons and bring sanity to the food and drug regulatory system. It wasn’t too much to ask for, but the principalities profiting from the system went to war against her – spiritual and physical.

It wasn’t an easy task when she took over, “it was very tough when we started,” she admitted in a 2009 interview with the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University.

Before 2001, NAFDAC, was in obscurity with several teeth that could not bite nor harm the counterfeiters it was supposed to hunt. “NAFDAC was not a big name. I heard about it vaguely, but it was not a place I would apply to work because it was not a popular place,” Dora Akunyili recounted.

The regulatory agency itself was said to be aiding the activities of the counterfeit barons before Akunyili, the impunity went unchecked for many years as money was exchanging hands. “Before I came into NAFDAC, the counterfeiters were paying their way to bring in whatever they wanted to bring in. I came in and said no, it would not happen again,” Akunyili said while lamenting the systemic corruption at NAFDAC when she took over.

She was a senior lecturer and a consultant pharmacologist in the College of Medicine at the University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) before she was appointed. But her Pharmacology degrees were not enough to land her the job and make her succeed in the role. Few years into the government of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, he was shopping for a perfect hand he could trust with NAFDAC to sanitize the system, in that process he heard about the heroic of Akunyili and how she (as Zonal Secretary of Petroleum (Special) Trust Fund (PTF)) returned 12,000 pounds to government coffers after she was paid 17,000 pounds to undergo a surgery in the United Kingdom but ended up spending 5,000 pounds.

She recalled: “I had a strange ailment then and was asked to go to Britain for treatment. I was supposed to have surgery, but it was a wrong diagnosis here in Nigeria. I went with 17,000 pounds: 12,000 for surgery, 5,000 for treatment, tests and others. In the end, it was found that I did not need surgery. So, I asked the hospital to give me the 12,000 pounds, which I had already paid. They were surprised that I wanted to return the money to my employers”.

When she returned the money to Muhammadu Buhari (now President), who was the Chairman of PTF at that time, he wrote her a letter praising her: “I did not know there were still some Nigerians with integrity.” Few years later, her action which did not go unnoticed, in a society plagued by endemic corruption, earned her the NAFDAC job. When she was appointed in 2001, asides the herculean task of fighting counterfeit products, she faced stiff opposition ranging from her gender, political affiliation, where she hailed from and those who saw her coming to office as a battle against ‘her people’.

“There were a lot of fights from the political class, they didn’t want him to give me the job because the Minister of Health was Igbo. I am Igbo and most of the drug counterfeiters are Igbos,” Akunyili said. “Remember, I am also a woman. But Obasanjo stood his ground and said, ‘No, this is the woman that will do the job’.”

She fought myriads of battles, from the propaganda at the homefront that she was fighting her kinsmen and blocking their source of livelihood to the spiritual and physical attacks. She never hid the fact that most drug counterfeiters were from her place in the southeast and she described it as “A very big issue. At a stage they carried that propaganda, that I was fighting my people.”

Being detached from the affluence and comfort of living with her upper middle class parent in Makurdi, Benue state where she was born didn’t deter her from becoming the best in whatever she got into from her childhood. At age 10, she was dispatched to her grandmother’s village in the southeast, where her uncle, who was a teacher, ensured she got good education and came out in flying colours.

“Village life is hell on earth. It was a shock to me as a child who was used to eating good food, having running water, to find myself in the village with no toilet facilities, no running water,” she told Guardian UK in 2007.

She was exceptionally brilliant from her childhood and it was not surprising that it was evident in her dealings at NAFDAC and every other position she held. She won scholarship twice – first to go to high school and another to study pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

On assumption of office at NAFDAC, She worked tirelessly and with significant success for the eradication of counterfeit drugs and unsafe food in Nigeria between 2001 and 2008. One of the driving forces behind her action, she would later reveal, was the death of her sister, Vivian, in 1988. She watched helplessly as Vivian, a diabetic, died after injecting herself with fake insulin.

“Not only was it fake and did not contain the insulin she was supposed to take, but it was also contaminated and gave her abscesses. She did not respond to antibiotics, and we just watched helplessly until she died,” she lamented.

In 1990, a former Deputy Director of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Adeoye Lambo, found that 54 percent of drugs in one of Lagos pharmacies were fake, the figure rose to 80 percent in the following year. A survey of 35 pharmacies in Lagos and Abuja in 2001, revealed that 48 percent of the products there were fake. To combat this, Akunyili directed that no drug should be sold except they have been authorized by NAFDAC. With massive media awareness warning Nigerians of the dangers of taking unauthorized drug and food products, many Nigerians imbibed the culture of painstakingly checking the label of any drug or food products for NAFDAC registration number and expiry dates before buying them. With that NAFDAC got rid of counterfeits.

Through her resilience, she put an end to the reign of impunity in the drug and food industry and gave the baron a run for their money, many of them after failing in their attempt to bring her down, took their trade to other neighbouring nations, she went after them and together with other West African nations, they created the West Africa Drug Regulatory Authority Network (WADRAN) to make the region hostile for the baron.

On different occasions, she personally led a team to invade the two most notorious fake drug markets in Nigeria – Idumota in Lagos and Onitsha Main Market in Anambra (her home state). She led the raid on Ogbo Owu market in Onitsha with a team of 350 policemen, 150 soldiers, and 150 staff members of NAFDAC to destroy counterfeit drugs.

All her actions came with a price, she refused to pay but she was shaken.

Her son, who was the only child of her six children living with her in Nigeria, was almost kidnapped from school until she told the kidnappers that Akunyili was her aunt and not her mother. A series of life threatening messages were sent to her husband, and she also escaped an assassination attempt in December 2003. Recounting her close shave with death, she said: “When they got very desperate, they even shot me. A bullet grazed my scalp, and it shattered my headscarf. It was a miracle that I survived”.

The attacks didn’t end there, within six days, NAFDAC secretariat in Lagos was razed on March 7, 2004, three days later, NAFDAC laboratory in Kaduna was burned down. “That was when I got hysterical. The next day, the arsonists went to Maiduguri (Borno). The day after, they went to Benin, but President Obasanjo had ordered more policemen to be sent and they did not succeed; they were chased out,” she said.

For the rest of her stay in office, she lived with an armed guard of nine policemen who watched over her round the clock. The policemen were initially four, the wave of attacks prompted Obasanjo to order the police to beef up security around her, her family and NAFDAC offices across the country.

At a time the name Dora Akunyili was synonymous to NAFDAC, many Nigerians never knew the agency existed before her appointment. After spending five years in office, fake drugs in circulation reduced from 70 percent in 2001 to 16.7 percent in 2006, according to a study conducted by WHO and DFID, while drug manufacturing outfits also rose from 70 to 150 by 2007. By the time she left NAFDAC in 2008, fake drugs in circulation had reduced to about 9-10 percent according to the agency’s assessment.

When she left NAFDAC, she was appointed Minister of Information and Communication under the administration of late President Umar Musa Yar’adua in December 2008. After leaving the office in December 2010, she ran for Senate under the platform of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in Anambra State but lost to Chris Ngige of the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). After then she was away from public until 2014 when she reappeared at the National Conference convened by the administration of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, she was looking frail and sickly. Her look shocked many Nigerians and sparked a series of reactions in the media. She died of uterine cancer at an Indian hospital on June 7 2014 at age 56.

Before her death, as a testament to her forthrightness, incorruptibility and excellent service, she received international recognition and numerous accolades for her work in pharmacology, public health, and human rights, including a Grassroots Human Rights Campaigner Award by International Service in 2005.