BusinessDay 18 Feb 2018

Sunday 18 February 2018
BD SUNDAY 29
SundayBusiness
Food &
Beverages
With
Ayo Oyoze Baje
The recent policy thrust
of the National Directorate
of Food and
Drugs Administration
and Control (NAF-
DAC) to reduce to its barest
minimum the hawking of unauthorized
drugs sold in major car
parks, inside commercial buses
and along the streets of urban
centres is both auspicious and
welcome. That they constitute
serious health hazards to the unsuspecting
consumers is stating
the obvious.
According to the current Director-General
of the award-winning
and impact making Agency,
Mrs. Christianah Adeyeye these
unwholesome and unregistered
drugs pose a great danger to the
society. Such drugs are exposed
to intense heat and sunlight making
them lose much of their efficacy.
The open and free selling of
Ideas
Nwaodu Lawrence
Chukwuemeka
IDEAS Exchange
Consulting, Lagos.
email - nwaodu.
lawrence@hotmail.co.uk
Cell: 07066375847.
The “Bribery Game” was the
usual institutional punishment
public goods game
with the punishing leader,
but with one additional choice—
players could not only keep money
for themselves or contribute to the
public pool, they could also contribute
to the leader. And the leader
could not only punish or not punish,
they could instead accept that
contribution. What happened? On
average, we saw contributions fall
by 25% compared to the game without
bribery as an option. More than
double what the pound has fallen
against the USD since Brexit (~12%.
Fine, bribery is costly. The World
Bank estimates $1 trillion is paid in
bribes alone; in Kenya, 8 out of 10
interactions with public officials
involves a bribe, and as pointed out
NAFDAC’S crackdown on fake drug hawkers
the drugs that are not registered
by NAFDAC provides an avenue
for those who also sell illicit drugs.
To bring this nefarious trade
to its knees, the Enforcement
officers will be unleashed on the
hawkers to ensure that they are
brought to speedy justice. Wanting
the public to be wary of them
she has this to say: “Medicines
should only be purchased from
registered premises. You should
always look out for manufacturing
and expiring dates, manufacturer’s
name, full location address
and NAFDAC registration number
on registered products.
It would be recalled that recently
two trucks loaded with
unregistered pharmaceutical
products were apprehended at
Marine Beach in Lagos. As investigations
are on, this incident brings
out some pertinent questions:
Who are the manufacturers as
well as importers of these drugs?
How did they get into the country?
Where were they destined for?
And how many of such drugs are
out there being sold to unsuspecting
buyers and consumers in the
open market?
The answers to these disturbing
questions would go a long
way towards eliminating the
production, distribution and sales
of these unwholesome products.
Besides, the incident also calls for
more sustainable partnerships
and collaborations between the
Agency and other organisations.
These include the Immigration
and Customs Services, the police,
state and local governments,
the traditional institution and of
course the media.
Truth be told, the mass media
has a critical role to play in getting
the public informed about the
negative effects in the manufacture,
importation, distribution,
sales and consumption of these
unregistered food and drugs. Such
collaboration during the tenures
of Prof. Dora Akinyuli (of blessed
memory) and Dr.Paul Orhii went
a long way towards some of the
remarkable successes achieved.
Furthermore, the federal government
has to adequately fund
NAFDAC to upgrade its programmes,
laboratories, human resource
management and services
to the public. This would assist it
to build on the people-oriented
policies and products on ground.
These include the introduction
of cutting-edge, anti-counterfeiting
technologies such as Truscan,
Black Eye(Infra Red) and Global
Pharma Health Fund(GPHF) Mini
Lab Test Kits and Radio Frequency
Identification System(RFID).
Another is the ISO 17025 accreditation
of its Mycotoxin and the
Pesticides Residues laboratories
by the American Association
of Laboratory (AALA), ranking
them as amongst the best anywhere
in the world.
Indeed, NAFDAC is the first
regulatory agency in the world to
use the Truscan. There is also the
deployment of modern technology
to test water which the producers
of sundry packaged ‘pure’ and
bottled water must strictly adhere
to. Almost on weekly basis, media
reports attest to the arrest and
subsequent prosecution of those
involved in the production and
marketing of fake processed food
and drugs.
Another feather in NAFDAC’s
colourful cap was the election of
the former resourceful and goalgetting
Director General, Dr.Paul
Orhii as the first-ever substantive
Chairman of the 193-member
WHO Member State Mechanism
on Spurious, Falsely Labeled, Falsified
and Counterfeit (SSFFCV)
medicinal products. Little wonder
that under Dr.Orhii, NAFDAC
was ranked amongst the world’s
top-20 international coalition of
elite Medicine Regulatory Authorities
in the world, with only
South Africa as the other African
country in that Ivy League.
All these are well-deserved,
as NAFDAC has over the years
been taken to a higher level in the
global drug anti-counterfeiting
battle. For instance, under Professor
Dora Akunyili (of blessed
memory) the agency truly upped
the ante in unraveling the racketeering
of fake and adulterated
processed drugs and foods and
used the unfailing factors of mass
mobilization and the courage to
do the right thing, to frontally battle
the menace of counterfeiting.
Similarly, during the tenure of her
successor, Dr. Orhii, the agency
pioneered the use of state-of-the
art technology and putting the
health of over 100 million Nigerians
directly in their own hands.
While Truscan is a hand-held
device for on-the-spot detection
of counterfeit medicines and
processed/packaged foods, Black
Eye, made in Israel is bench-top
equipment using Infra Red technology
to detect fake drugs. On
its part, the RFID is used for verification
of regulated products and
other sensitive documents. The
MAS technology is also known
as Scratch and Text messaging
system. It enables consumers to
confirm whether the drug they
intend to purchase is genuine or
not through the use of a mobile
phone.
This useful technology is registered
with the major telecommunication
networks in the country
such as Glo, MTN, Airteland
Etisalat while the text message is
at no cost to the consumers. The
consumer finds a distinctive panel
on the medicine packet/card with
the necessary instructions and
scratches the surface to reveal a
ten-digit pin. What he does next
is to simply text the ten-digit pin
to the code number on the panel
and in few seconds the consumer
receives an SMS confirming
whether the drug is genuine or
not. This technology also confirms
the name of the drug, NAFDAC
registration number on the product,
the name of manufacturer,
the batch number and expiry date
and an enquiry number. Brilliant
isn’t it?
Taking it further and to ensure
that consumers buy only drugs
that are of high quality, wholesome
and safe, NAFDAC has
directed all manufacturers, importers
and marketers to provide
only drugs that are MAS-enabled.
Baje is Nigerian first Food
Technologist in the media
Bribery, corruption and the evolution of prosocial institutions: Part 2
in the paper, most of humanity—6
billion people—live in nations with
high levels of corruption. The model
also reveals that unlike the typical institutional
punishment public goods
game, where stronger institutions
mean that more cooperation can be
sustained, when bribery is an option,
stronger institutions mean more
bribery. A small bribe multiplied by
the number of players will make you
a lot richer than your share of the
public good!
So can it be fixed? The usual
answer is transparency. There are
also some interesting approaches,
like tying a leader’s salary to the
country’s GDP—the Singaporean
model. So what happened when
these strategies are introduced?
Well, when the public goods multiplier
was high (economic potential—potential
to make money
using legitimate means—was high)
or the institution had power to
punish, then contributions went
up. Not to levels without bribery
as an option, but higher. But in poor
contexts with weak punishing institutions,
transparency had no effect
or backfired. As did the Singaporean
model. Why?
Consider what transparency
does. It tells us what people are
doing. But as psychological and cultural
evolutionary research reveals,
this solves a common knowledge
problem and reveals the descriptive
norm—what people are doing.
For it to have any hope of changing
behavior, we need a prescriptive or
proscriptive norm against corruption.
Without this, transparency just
reinforces that everyone is accepting
bribes and you had be a fool not
to. People who have lived in corrupt
countries will have felt this frustration
first hand. There’s a sense that
it’s not about bad apples—the
society is broken in ways that are
sometimes difficult to articulate.
But societal norms are not arbitrary.
They are adapted to the local environment
and influenced by historical
contexts. In the experiment, the
parameters created the environment.
If there really is no easy way
to legitimately make money and
the state doesn’t have the power to
punish free-riders, then bribery really
is the right option. So even among
Canadians, admittedly some of the
nicest people in the world, in these
in-game parameters, corruption
was difficult to eradicate. When
the country is poor and the state
has no power, transparency doesn’t
tell you not to pay a bribe, it solves a
different problem—it tells you the
price of the bribe. Not “should I pay”,
but “how much”?
There were some other nuances
to the experiment that deserve follow
up. If we had played the game
in Cameroon instead of Canada,
we suspect baseline bribery would
have been higher. Indeed, people
with direct exposure to corruption
norms encouraged more corruption
in the game controlling for ethnic
background. And those with an
ethnic background that included
more corrupt countries, but without
direct exposure were actually
better cooperators than the third
generation+ Canadians. These
results may reveal some of the
effects of migration and historical
path dependence. Of course, great
caution is required in applying these
results to the messiness of the real
world. A further investigation into
these cultural patterns is hoped to
be carried out in future work.
The experiment also reveals
that corruption may be quite high
in developed countries, but its
costs aren’t as easily felt. Leaders
in richer nations like the United
States may accept “bribes” in the
form of lobbying or campaign
funding and these may indeed
be costly for the efficiency of the
economy, but it may be the difference
between a city building 25
or 20 schools. In a poor country
similar corruption may be the difference
between a city building 3
or 1 school. Five is more than 3, but
3 is three times more than 1. In a
rich nation, the cost of corruption
may be larger in absolute value,
but in a poorer nation, it may be
larger in relative value and felt
more acutely.
The take home is that cooperation
and corruption are two sides
of the same coin; different scales
of cooperation competing. This
approach gives us a powerful theoretical
and empirical toolkit for
developing a framework for understanding
corruption, why some
states succeed and others fail, why
some oscillate, and the triggers that
may lead to failed states succeeding
and successful states failing.
Our cultural evolutionary biases
lead us to look for whom to learn
from and perhaps whom to avoid.
They lead us to blame individuals for
corruption. But just as atrocities are
the acts of many humans cooperating
toward an evil end, corruption is
a feature of a society not individuals.
Indeed, corruption is arguably
easier to understand than my fearless
acceptance of my anonymous
barista’s coffee. Our tendency to
favor those who share copies of
our genes—a tendency all animals
share—lead to both love of family
and nepotism. Putting our buddies
before others is as ancient as our
species, but it creates inefficiencies
in a meritocracy. Innovation
are often the result of applying
well-established approaches in one
area to the problems of another. We
hope the science of cooperation
and cultural evolution will give us
new tools in combating corruption.
Putting aside what it means for
something to be natural for our species,
suffice to say these are recent
inventions in our evolutionary history,
by no means culturally universal,
and not shared by our closest cousins.
Genes that identify and favor
copies of themselves will spread.
Helping those who help you. The
United Nations Human Development
Index ranks the United States
10th in the world. Liberia is 177th.
Temporal discounting the degree
to which we value the future less
than the present. Our tendency to
value the present over the future is
one reason we don’t yet have Moon
or Mars colonies, but the degree to
which we do this varies from society
to society.