The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control has advised Nigerians to avoid buying unbranded cereals in the open market.
The Director General, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, said this in a statement at the Agency’s Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Directorate Stakeholder’s Engagement with food sector operators in Lagos.
She insisted that “When a product is not certified by NAFDAC it is not advisable that anybody should consume it. The unbranded products in the market, do not have NAFDAC registration/marketing authorisation number.”
Adeyeye also warned food manufacturing companies that it would no longer accept poorly destroyed expired or stolen products sneaking into the market through scavengers at the waste dump site, thereby endangering the lives of innocent consumers, particularly, children.
She emphasised that all the products that had gone through the regulatory processes were packaged with NAFDAC registration numbers on them.
‘’We cannot speak to the safety of unbranded food in the open market. We do not know where they have come from. We don’t know anything about the expiry date. We cannot trace,” she said.
The statement added that in 2021 and 2022, the Agency carried out a lot of investigation and enforcement activities on unbranded cereals leading to the arrest of some people that were selling online in Onitsha and brought them to Lagos.
She argued that some industries were also complicit in this saying, “we found out that some of the cereals were picked up from dump sites in Agbara.”
Adeyeye said, “If you want to dispose of some bad or expired products, you are supposed to destroy it by NAFDAC Investigation and Enforcement Directorate, not by the company directly through waste disposal authorities. It will always get to scavengers who will sell it back to the market.”