19 Mar 2009 |
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Life in the age of fakery By Levi Obijiofor THE racy headline sparked my interest. It read: "Nigerian student gets 19 years for love scam". The first paragraph of the story posted on the Yahoo!7 web page on Tuesday this week explained it all.
"A Nigerian undergraduate has been sentenced to 19 years in prison for obtaining $47,000 (33,382 pounds) from an Australian woman by convincing her over the Internet that he was 57 years old, white, and madly in love with her... He said he was an engineer working in Lagos whose wife and only child had been killed in an accident." By the end of the intro, I knew the story was another case of the familiar "419" financial fraud which continues to give Nigerians residing overseas a very bad image. Beyond financial fraud, there is another kind of forgery that has continued to claim the lives of Nigerians inside Nigeria. It is the production, marketing and distribution of fake and adulterated goods and medicine. Someone once asked me: Is there any consumer item in the Nigerian market that has not been adulterated through the evil genius of the merchants of fake products in our society? Despite the extraordinary efforts made by officers of the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and despite commendable successes recorded by NAFDAC under the leadership of former boss, Dora Akunyili, fake and contaminated consumer products continue to occupy dominant space in our markets. Just last week, NAFDAC warned the nation against the consumption of a killer brand of salt circulating in the market. NAFDAC's Cross River State office explained that the 25kg bags of salt were specifically for industrial use rather than for human consumption. That brand of salt was susceptible to easy contamination by dust and other agents because, according to the information, it lacked the ability to maintain its iodine content if exposed to moisture for an unduly long period of time. This latest warning, coming so soon after the death and disaster brought to many families by the so-called MyPikin infants' medication, should serve as a reminder that consumer goods and medical products in Nigeria are not immune from the vile practices of the kings and queens of fake and adulterated goods. As the controversy over MyPikin gradually settles, we seem to be approaching another juncture in our traumatic life experience. Why do Nigerian markets still serve as a veritable boulevard for the sale of adulterated goods? Everywhere you go, in pharmacies and hospitals (yes, hospitals too have had their own share of the scandals), in shops and markets, at the airport and train station, in open streets and in dark alleyways, in the universities and in secondary schools, you will find someone trying to sell fake or contaminated products. It seems no one cares that the list of victims of fake products has continued to grow. There are a number of villainous men and women bubbling with negatively geared creative ideas directed at the production, distribution or marketing of illicit consumer goods. No product, made in Nigeria or overseas, is beyond the reach of the poisonous minds and manipulative fingers of these depraved men and women. Money is the engine that drives and sustains this deadly practice. Those who produce, market and distribute contaminated goods are unconcerned about the impact of their schemes on the health and lives of our population. The magnitude of adulterated products circulating freely in Nigerian markets and streets has reached epidemic proportions. The fight against fake and contaminated products must receive the priority attention of political leaders and security chiefs. It is not going to be an easy battle because there are various interests at stake. More fundamentally, the high chiefs of contaminated goods do not play by the rules. The only way to engage them is to speak to them in the language they understand - force. Their motto is encrusted in the blood-chilling phrase: Anything is commercially viable in the Nigerian market. They are right. And we all must be worried. Fighting the merchants of counterfeit and contaminated goods is a risky business essentially because the producers and the marketers of these products, including other high profile stakeholders, constitute a mafia of some sort. They detest official interference in their reprehensible business. They have their own foot soldiers, always willing and able to defend the business interests of their sponsors. They are prepared to pay the supreme sacrifice in order to protect their unlawful business. They operate in a shadowy world in which the advancement of dishonest practices is the underlying philosophy. Someone once declared rather exuberantly that virtually every consumer product in the Nigerian market is a killer. That could well be an exaggeration or an accurate representation of the Nigerian situation. This is why. When we are confronted with disasters caused by fake and contaminated products such as MyPikin, our immediate reaction is to shout and stamp our feet momentarily on available hard surface. After a few days of paroxysms of anger, we forget the source of our pain, almost as if nothing had happened. There is every reason why we should worry over the manner with which the MyPikin scandal was handled. The Federal Government may not have sanctioned the sale and distribution of MyPikin but it has, through apathy, behaved like an accessory after the fact. Prosecution of the suspects in the MyPikin scandal is currently in progress but we must expect that successful prosecution would be followed by punitive measures for those responsible for that criminal behaviour. Many families are yet to recover from the grief that followed the loss of their babies. The dangers to human health of the consumption of fake, adulterated and sub-standard products circulating in the markets are real. As a television journalist who reported on NAFDAC's fight against fake and adulterated drugs explained some four years ago: adulterated drugs "kill by stealth, by failing to cure and by creating drug-resistant killer diseases - fake antibiotics, anti-malarials, drugs for tuberculosis, diabetes, heart disease, intravenous drips, injectables all expertly packaged to look real." Merchants of fake and adulterated products are so good at what they do. In a society in which many products are fake or contaminated, it is incredibly hard for the public to differentiate the genuine from the forged product. The fight against fake and adulterated drugs in Nigeria has been long and unending. In 2003, a major controversy broke out at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu, over the authenticity and quality of drugs used to treat children with heart defects. The scandal was exposed following a visit to the hospital by a team of volunteers from the International Heart Foundation. The team visited the hospital to operate on children with heart problems. At the time, 12 children were operated at the hospital. One of the children who were operated on was a six-year-old child. The Heart Foundation team expressed frustration at the prevalence of fake drugs in Enugu and indeed in Nigeria. As the team leader noted in a television documentary, more than 75 per cent of the drugs used in treating the children lacked potency. It was a heart-wrenching experience for the international team but that experience underlined the sheer scale of the problem of fake drugs in Nigeria. Four of the children were reported to have died, including the six-year-old. When NAFDAC launched its own investigation into the scandal, the results were even more astonishing. NAFDAC's laboratory tests showed that the adrenalin was fake and substandard. And so too were some of the infusions. NAFDAC investigators eventually traced the fake drugs to Onitsha market. Further investigations by NAFDAC also revealed that substandard muscle relaxant and contaminated drips were used in the hospital. In her capacity as NAFDAC chairperson at the time, Dora Akunyili said quite rightly in that television documentary: "In Nigeria, people die and they say 'Oh, that's the way God wants it. We don't want to go to court. God has given, God has taken away'. But in developed countries people will go to court. People will sue the doctor. People will sue the manufacturers. And I want it to happen. When people start suing them, taking them to court, then they will sit up." The problem goes beyond seeking legal damages. How many impoverished parents who lose their children or family members through consumption of fake and adulterated drugs or indeed any other products can afford the money to engage the services of lawyers?
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