NAFDAC moves to tighten food registration, assures Nigerians on public safety

The Director General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Christiana Mojisola Adeyeye, has assured Nigerians of the agency’s commitment to reducing crimes associated with food registration processes in order to safeguard public health.

Adeyeye said NAFDAC had adopted technology to prevent the undermining of enforcement effectiveness, warning that regulatory tools must keep pace with increasingly sophisticated criminal networks.

She disclosed this at a press briefing in Lagos, where she said regulatory modernisation had become a strategic imperative to ensure that the agency’s systems remained credible, efficient, transparent and fit for purpose, while protecting public health and supporting access to quality, safe and effective regulated products.

According to her, NAFDAC’s modernisation drive is anchored on five strategic pillars: strong leadership and governance; institutionalisation of best practices; safety and quality of regulated products; continuous monitoring along the supply chain; and efficient financial and performance management.

Adeyeye said the agency had adopted standards that enabled it to design, implement and institutionalise systems, policies, guidelines and procedures for all regulatory processes, ensuring consistent service delivery.

“The agency instruments ensure fairness, consistency, and preparedness in regulatory decision-making. Lending further credence to these efforts, NAFDAC attained ISO 9001 certification in 2019 and has since demonstrated a culture of continual improvement by consistently sustaining the certification to date,” she said.

She added that one of the agency’s most significant achievements was the institutionalisation of Good Regulatory Practices across NAFDAC, based on a strong legal framework, which embeds principles of transparency, accountability, consistency, stakeholder engagement and evidence-based decision-making into regulatory processes.

To support this, Adeyeye said NAFDAC had strengthened and gazetted more than 28 regulations covering its regulated products, providing a robust legal and operational framework that ensured clarity, predictability and fairness in regulatory oversight.