SIR: By all accounts, the concern for child welfare raised by the Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Professor Mojisola Adeyeye during her recent interview on a private television is legitimate. No society should casually ignore underage exposure to alcohol.
However, the ongoing enforcement of the sachet alcohol ban exposes a troubling pattern in Nigeria’s regulatory culture: a preference for moral panic and blunt-force bans over nuanced, enforceable, and evidence-based public policy.
The argument that sachet alcohol is “turning our children into addicts” may be emotionally powerful, but public policy cannot be driven by rhetoric alone. It must be driven by data, context, and realism. Unfortunately, NAFDAC’s posture on this matter raises more questions than it answers.

First, the ban confuses accessibility with causation. Alcohol abuse among minors in Nigeria is not a sachet problem but a challenge of parenting, enforcement, education, and societal problems. Without any fear of contradiction, beer, foreign bottled drinks, herbal mixtures, locally brewed gin (ogogoro), and unregulated concoctions remain widely available to underage persons—often sold openly without any form of age verification. Eliminating sachet packaging does not eliminate alcohol consumption; it merely shifts consumption to other, often more dangerous sources.
Second, the DG’s dismissal of warning labels is ineffective because “who will enforce?” is deeply ironic. Enforcement is precisely the statutory responsibility of NAFDAC and allied agencies. To admit that enforcement mechanisms do not work and then use that failure as justification for a ban is to concede regulatory incompetence while punishing manufacturers and consumers for it.
If Nigeria cannot enforce age restrictions on alcohol sales, then the failure lies with institutions, not packaging.
Third, the economic implications have been treated with alarming casualness. The sachet alcohol value chain employs thousands of Nigerians—from factory workers to distributors, transporters, and small retailers, many of whom operate at the margins of survival.

Shutting down “production lines,” as the DG euphemistically puts it, translates in reality to loss of jobs, shuttered SMEs, and increased poverty in an already strained economy. Public health policy that ignores economic fallout is not progressive—it is careless.
Fourth, the reliance on an agreement reached in 2018 as moral justification is weak. Nigeria in 2025 is not Nigeria in 2018. Inflation has skyrocketed, unemployment has worsened, and sachet products—whether water, alcohol, or beverages—exist largely because poverty dictates purchasing power. When regulators refuse to acknowledge socioeconomic realities, policies fail on arrival.
More troubling is the tone of absolutism: “We cannot sacrifice our children on the altar of trade.” This framing presents a false choice. It suggests that economic survival and child protection are mutually exclusive when, in fact, smart regulation can and should achieve both.

Globally, countries manage underage drinking through strict retail licensing, penalties for vendors, public education, advertising controls, and community enforcement—not outright packaging bans that are easily circumvented. Nigeria should not pretend to be reinventing public health policy while ignoring globally accepted best practices.
Finally, the invocation of international treaties without transparent disclosure of their specific obligations feels more like a shield than an explanation. International agreements are meant to guide policy, not replace critical thinking or local adaptation.

In the end, the sachet alcohol ban reflects a broader governance issue: the tendency of regulators to reach for bans because they are easy to announce, even when they are difficult to justify, enforce, or sustain.
Protecting children is non-negotiable. But protecting children requires serious policy work, not symbolism. Until Nigeria confronts weak enforcement, informal markets, parental responsibility, and poverty, sachet bans will remain what they often become—headline-friendly decisions with little real-world impact. And that is the real danger: mistaking regulation for progress.

Mildred Dokun, a market research expert, wrote from Lagos.