15 Years In Jail: Senate Targets Fake Drug Syndicates
Lawmakers in the upper chamber have signalled their strongest intent yet to confront Nigeria’s long running counterfeit medicine crisis, advancing a bill that would send anyone convicted of producing or trafficking fake drugs to prison for up to 15 years and strip them of assets tied to the trade.
The Counterfeit Medical Products, Fake Drugs and Unwholesome Processed Foods (Prohibition and Control) Bill, 2026, marked SB.951, passed second reading on the Senate floor on Wednesday. Sponsored by Senator Umar Sadiq Suleiman, who represents Kwara North, the proposal seeks to repeal the Counterfeit and Fake Drugs and Unwholesome Processed Foods Act, Cap. C34, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004, and replace it with a framework built for the realities of today’s counterfeit trade.
Leading the debate, Suleiman argued that the existing law, now more than two decades old, had been overtaken by events. He pointed to online drug sales, cross border trafficking, increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting methods and organised criminal syndicates as threats the 2004 statute was never designed to address. According to him, the legislation is aimed at “protecting Nigerians from preventable deaths and disabilities caused by fake medicines while restoring confidence in the country’s healthcare system and the legitimate pharmaceutical industry.”
The bill casts a wide net. It criminalises the “production, importation, manufacture, transportation, distribution, sale, possession and facilitation of counterfeit medical products, fake drugs and unwholesome processed foods,” and outlaws the production or possession of counterfeit labels, wrappers, packaging materials and equipment. It further prohibits the sale and hawking of medicines at unauthorised locations, among them open markets, motor parks, roadside stalls, buses, ferries and unlicensed online platforms.
On enforcement, the proposal hands the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control expanded powers to deploy modern product tracking technologies, set up national and state task forces, inspect facilities, seize counterfeit products, arrest suspects, seal premises and tighten surveillance at the country’s ports of entry. To speed up prosecution, it vests exclusive jurisdiction over such offences in the Federal High Court and provides for accelerated trials.
The debate drew broad support, though not without caution. Senator Samson Ekong of Akwa Ibom South called the bill timely and overdue, remarking that fake medicines had become so widespread that casket makers were among the chief beneficiaries of the avoidable deaths that followed. Former labour leader and Edo North Senator Adams Oshiomhole said virtually every Nigerian was either a victim or a potential victim, describing counterfeit drugs as “instruments of death” and linking them to rising cases of kidney disease and organ failure.
Several senators, including Deputy Senate President Barau Jibrin, Adeniyi Adegbonmire of Ondo Central, former Senate Leader Yahaya Abdullahi and Anambra Central’s Victor Umeh, urged clarity on how the new law would relate to NAFDAC’s existing mandate to avoid duplicating functions. Barau noted that the agency itself backed the bill because of gaps in the current legal framework. Senate President Godswill Akpabio, who presided, said those concerns would be resolved at the committee stage, and referred the bill to the Committee on Health, Secondary and Tertiary, with a directive to report back within four weeks.
The urgency behind the bill is grounded in hard numbers. The World Health Organisation estimates that at least one in every ten medicines in low and middle income countries is substandard or falsified, a trade it values at about 30.5 billion dollars a year. Estimates for Nigeria run higher, with some WHO figures putting the share of fake medicines at between 20 and 30 per cent, though NAFDAC has countered with a range of 13 to 15 per cent. The country’s heavy reliance on imports, roughly 70 per cent of the medicines Nigerians consume, deepens the exposure.
The legislative push follows one of the most aggressive regulatory campaigns in the agency’s history. Between February and March 2025, NAFDAC shut down the sprawling open drug markets at Idumota in Lagos, Ogbo Ogwu in Onitsha and Ariaria in Aba, evacuating and destroying banned, expired and falsified products valued at more than one trillion naira. Officials at the time described the haul as running into scores of 40 foot truckloads, including narcotics and controlled substances stored in conditions that breached basic distribution standards.
If the bill clears its remaining hurdles and is signed into law, it would represent the most far reaching overhaul of Nigeria’s anti counterfeit regime in a generation, moving the country closer to the enforcement standards adopted elsewhere. For now, its fate rests with the health committee and the public hearing that will follow.