Menace Of Fake Products

Nigerians have grown used to the low-stakes version of counterfeiting, the fake designer shirt that fades after one wash, the knockoff perfume that smells right in the shop and wrong an hour later. What the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control(NAFDAC) and the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) have documented in recent weeks is a different order of problem entirely.

Counterfeit Oral-B toothpaste circulating in local markets, with fears that toxic chemicals such as diethylene glycol have replaced safe ingredients. Fake Hollandia yoghurt, packaged under unsanitary conditions and detectable only through side-by-side consumer comparisons of texture and barcode. Branded 19-litre water bottles collected empty, refilled with untreated water from unapproved sources, and resold to supermarkets and hotels under the original brand’s name. Counterfeit antimalarials, antibiotics, codeine-laced cough syrups and hormonal drugs moving through regional trade routes. And, perhaps most alarming of all, fake brake fluid, chemically adulterated with corrosive industrial solvents that fail at exactly the moment a driver needs their brakes most.

That last example deserves particular attention, because it makes plain what has changed about this problem. A fake shirt disappoints a customer. Fake brake fluid, with a boiling point too low to withstand the heat generated under hard driving, causes vapour lock and total brake failure on a highway, an outcome indistinguishable from an accident until an investigation, if one ever happens, traces it back to a counterfeit part sold in a motor parts market in Kano, Lagos or Anambra.

Nigeria’s counterfeiting problem has moved from consumer disappointment into preventable death, and the country’s regulatory response needs to reflect that shift with the urgency it deserves rather than the routine enforcement rhythm it has followed so far.

What makes the current wave harder to contain than earlier rounds of counterfeiting is a structural change NAFDAC’s own director of Investigation and Enforcement has flagged: foreign syndicates that once imported finished fake goods through Nigeria’s borders have begun establishing underground production and logistics hubs inside the country itself. That shift matters enormously for how Nigeria has to respond.

Border inspection, the traditional first line of defence against counterfeit imports, does nothing to stop a fake product manufactured in a warehouse inside Nigeria and distributed through the same supply chains that carry genuine goods. This is now a domestic law enforcement and market surveillance problem as much as a customs one, and treating it primarily as a border issue, as Nigeria’s regulatory posture has tended to do, leaves the local production hubs these syndicates have built largely untouched.

NAFDAC and SON deserve credit for the seizures and public alerts documented here. Uncovering the illegal water-refilling scheme, intercepting caches of fake pharmaceuticals, and issuing warnings about counterfeit toothpaste and dairy products all reflect agencies doing real enforcement work rather than sitting on the problem. But seizure and destruction, however satisfying as a headline, is not the same as deterrence, and this newspaper wants to know what happens to the people running these operations after the cameras leave the warehouse.

How many of the operators behind the branded water-bottle refilling scheme have actually been prosecuted, rather than merely disrupted for a few weeks before resuming under a different address. How many counterfeit brake fluid distributors in Kano, Lagos and Anambra’s motor parts markets have faced criminal charges that carried a sentence serious enough to change the economics of the trade for them.

Without that data published alongside every seizure announcement, Nigerians have no way of judging whether enforcement is actually working or only generating a steady stream of confiscation photographs while the underlying networks regroup and reopen.

This Newspaper also believes Nigerians deserve accessible, well-publicised guidance on identifying counterfeit products in the categories most likely to harm them, alongside reporting channels simple enough that an ordinary shopper who suspects a fake product actually knows who to call and trusts that calling will lead somewhere.

But awareness campaigns treat the symptom, not the disease. A Nigerian consumer educated on spotting a counterfeit toothpaste tube still cannot inspect the chemical composition of brake fluid before it is poured into their car, and no amount of public literacy substitutes for a regulatory system that catches these products before they reach a shelf, a mechanic’s workshop, or a hotel water dispenser in the first place.

Nigeria’s regulatory agencies have the legal mandate and, on this evidence, the operational capacity to find these networks. What the country still needs is the follow-through: published prosecution outcomes, penalties severe enough to outweigh the profit in counterfeiting, and accountability extended to the retailers and distributors whose shelves make this trade possible.

Given the breadth of what has surfaced in a single month, medicine, food, drinking water and a car part that fails at highway speed, this newspaper believes the moment has arrived for President Bola Tinubu to declare a national emergency on fake and substandard products, giving NAFDAC, SON and the security agencies a coordinated mandate, ring-fenced funding and a single public accountability structure to dismantle these networks rather than pursuing them agency by agency, seizure by seizure.

A crisis touching toothpaste, milk, water and brakes all at once is no longer a series of isolated enforcement stories. It is a national emergency, and it deserves to be declared one. A fake shirt is an inconvenience. A fake brake fluid canister is a death sentence waiting for the right stretch of highway, and Nigeria’s response to this crisis should be measured against that stake, not against the modest standard of counterfeit clothing it has been treated as for too long.