Tinubu’s Paracetamol Ban: Can it Decolonise Pharmacy Education?
Calixthus Okoruwa
How does a country which boasts over 20 pharmacy schools, some of which have been producing pharmacists since the 1960s, continue to import paracetamol tablets and syrups in 2026? Should the University of Benin Teaching Hospital which is separated by a low fence from the university’s Faculty of Pharmacy be consuming paracetamol made in China, India and Cote d’Ivoire?
The questions above, reinforce one of the major contradictions in Nigeria’s educational curriculum: the stark disconnect between education and the country’s long-term industrial development aspirations.
Nigeria’s earliest university, the then University College Ibadan was established by the colonial authorities as a campus of the university of London, to help meet the manpower needs of the colonial administration. To keep pace with the country’s growth, the colonial government needed teachers, high level operatives in the civil service and judiciary as well as doctors and nurses to attend to the health needs of the burgeoning population. Sending the locals for training in Britain was no longer sustainable and training them locally, as much as possible, in the best traditions of the British university was the practical option. So, in addition to the university college, the colonial administrators would also set up the University College Hospital, Ibadan, to among others, train medical manpower: doctors, nurses and other health workers. The university was largely focused on addressing the needs of the colonial administrators, so there was no emphasis on applied technical training or industrial production, as industrialization of its colonies was not on the agenda.
On attaining independence in 1960, Nigeria would begin to set up its own universities. Universities sprang up in quick succession in Nsukka, Ile-Ife, Lagos, Zaria and Benin-City, respectively. Today, Nigeria has about 309 accredited universities, according to data from the National Universities Commission. Paradoxically, however, it would appear that in subsequently setting up its own universities, Nigeria adopted wholesale, the colonial model and failed to truly indigenise these institutions.
This crisis manifests to a large extent, in the white-collar nature of Nigeria’s university education and its products. Visit an engineering faculty in any of our universities and you could find fans and air conditioners long broken down and abandoned. Neither teacher nor student is able to fix them, because such hands-on tasks are alien to the colonial-styled curriculum whose objective it would appear, is to churn out administratively-oriented engineers, rather than inventors and innovators. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the most complex engineering jobs in Nigeria still must be handled by Julius Berger & Company, Cappa and other foreign firms.
The state of Nigeria’s pharmaceutical industry is an even more poignant reflection of the country’s educational crisis. Nigeria’s pharmacy schools continue to run a curriculum that does not recognize the critical role of pharmacy as an industrial bedrock for the country. The course is laden with hundreds of hours of elaborate theoretical exercises but remarkably short on the aspects of industrial simulation and training. The result is that pharmacy students go through the course without necessarily imbibing an industrial mindset. The few who imbibe an industrial mindset, do so in spite of the predilection of the pharmacy schools, not because of it.
In a developing country like Nigeria, awash with lush forests and rivers and bounded considerably by the ocean, pharmacy is a potential industrial epicentre. This is not only because of the immense pharmaceutical potential innate in our country’s diverse flora and fauna, but also because of the massive economic potential in tending to the health of over 200 million Nigerians and the hundreds of millions more people across the continent. From both healthcare and economic perspectives, Nigeria ought to be a major continental superpower on the back of industrial pharmacy. Nigeria’s 23 Faculties of Pharmacy ought to be actively churning out the skilled manpower to support this vibrant industrial pharmaceutical base.
It is a sad and painful paradox that instead, Nigeria not only imports finished medicines but also the constituents of these medicines including inert excipients like starch. Yes, Nigeria imports starch for drug manufacture! So rather than be the pharmacy of Africa, Nigeria has for long been one of the leading global pharmaceutical dumping grounds. It is in this light, that one must welcome and indeed commend President Tinubu’s recent ban on the importation of paracetamol, a commonly-used pain reliever, alongside a host of other medicines. Nigeria will never rise to its true potential if there will always be a ready resort to imported alternatives.
The paracetamol importation ban follows in the footsteps of a similar ban on the export of shea-butter nuts. The ban on the export of shea-butter nuts was for an initial 6-month period which has since been extended by another 12-months. The objective, ostensibly, is to encourage Nigerians to strive to add value to shea-butter, which is economically more beneficial to the country, than merely exporting raw nuts. Nigeria, by the way is one of the world’s biggest sources of shea-butter, a key ingredient in the global manufacture of cosmetic- and medicinal-creams. Ironically, for many decades, Nigeria merely exported raw shea butter nuts only to import processed shea-butter and finished creams.
While government’s intention with these bans is clearly patriotic and progressive, the government needs to thread systematically in order to ensure that the bans do not end up as ineffective and meaningless pronouncements. For the bans to be effective, they need to be anchored on a visionary program that integrates Nigeria’s industrial potential with deliberate manpower training and development. In this regard, there is an urgent imperative to radically remodel the training curriculum for pharmaceutical education in Nigeria and tailor it in line with Nigeria’s industrialization aspirations. The same applies to other technical and technological specialties.
Professional bodies in pharmacy, therefore, need to come together to methodically reappraise and remodel the training curriculum of pharmacists. The colonial model which sought primarily to create experts in administration, hospital and retail practice, needs to give way to a more rounded model that embraces clinical, administrative and commercial components and yet places Nigeria’s industrial growth at its epicentre.
A major way by which the pharmacy profession can do this is to incorporate pilot drug manufacturing operations in the pharmacy training curriculum. This will expose students to different facets of industrial pharmacy, helping them to imbibe industrial mindsets. Such manufacturing operations which will be overseen by regulatory authorities should, for instance, be tasked to meet specific drug needs of affiliated teaching hospitals. The pilot drug manufacturing operation of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Lagos, for instance, may be tasked with, among others, meeting the paracetamol tablet and syrup needs of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital.
Such manufacturing operations, will entrust students, under the supervision of their experienced teachers with key aspects of the research and sourcing of raw materials, manufacturing, quality control, packaging and supply chain management. It will enable students learn to assess problems and provide solutions in an empirical fashion, knowing that they will be held accountable for program successes or failures.
Such a hands-on learning approach is the masterstroke of medical education in Nigeria and a major reason why Nigeria’s medical doctors, despite the country’s teaching infrastructure challenges and harsh learning environment, continue to be in high demand globally. The teaching hospital model encourages experiential clinical learning which when combined with theoretical work creates work-ready doctors. Nigeria’s pharmaceutical and technical education must learn from the teaching hospital model to help Nigeria optimize its industrial potential.
A hands-on training curriculum that exposes pharmacy students all through their schooling to industrial elements as highlighted above, is very likely to create industry-oriented pharmacists. Painstakingly implemented, such a curriculum is likely to turn Nigeria into a bee-hive of cottage pharmaceutical manufacturing operations, as the orientation of pharmacists would have been drastically reordered. Nigeria, would, in such circumstances, be more likely to be exporting pharmaceutical products to the rest of Africa, than importing paracetamol tablets from China or bars of soap from Benin Republic.
Such a rounded and industrially-grounded training curriculum, however, would require cross-sectional support. University vice chancellors need to provide funding, infrastructure and other assistance. Regulators like NAFDAC and the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria need to avail the different universities of critical guidance and oversight. The ministries of labour and education would also need to evolve special remuneration packages or allowances for university teachers involved in these technical-cum-commercial operations.
Very importantly, these pilot manufacturing operations would be expected to compete with commercial establishments, and yield a profit to their universities. In other words, even though they are not set up primarily for profit, they are not expected to be loss-making operations either. This creates yet another imperative: students under the guidance of their teachers, must learn and imbibe business management fundamentals, very early on in their professional journeys.
Nigeria needs such a radical program, if we are to begin to systematically ensure that our education is in sync with our industrial development aspirations. Professions like pharmacy need to wake up and begin to think differently from the colonial masters who created the framework for Nigeria’s tertiary education.
I can already sense pharmacists, engineers and other professions pushing back on this proposal, with sundry excuses. There will be excuses of inadequate funding, poor and unreliable electricity supply, infrastructure inadequacies, poor teacher remuneration and many others. These are all valid excuses. However, operatives in the technical education sphere need to take this radical first step of incorporating hands-on training in their curricula and by so doing, drag the government and larger society into providing needed support. To paraphrase one great writer: “society makes way for a man who knows where he is headed.” If technical educators demonstrate, that they know where they are headed, they will receive societal support. The example of medical doctor training is a good reference point. No one, government or private, sets up a medical school today, without an affiliated teaching hospital. The same logic should apply to industrially-inclined professions like pharmacy and engineering. No pilot manufacturing or industrial facility, no accreditation.
In a 2024 article, “Before Tinubu’s executive order on drugs”, published in several national newspapers, I had canvassed that Nigeria’s pharmaceutical sector could learn from the trajectory of another developing country, Bangladesh. Bangladesh, an otherwise poor developing country is a major exporter of drugs to Nigeria and indeed, the rest of the world. Its pharmaceutical success story was founded on a deliberate and fastidiously implemented government policy that sought to encourage local production of medicines.
India is yet another example that Nigeria can learn from. Even though it was once in the same boat as Nigeria, importing all manner of medicines from around the world, India has in the last five decades or so, not only become self-sufficient in drug production, it is now the undisputed “pharmacy of the world,” producing generic medicines that are consumed globally. All of this has come to pass on the back of deliberate and systematic government policy, implemented with unwavering discipline.
Nigeria must evolve and implement policies that are unique to its peculiar circumstances. Government has shown by its ban on the importation of paracetamol and other medicines that it is not averse to instituting policy measures to drive Nigeria’s industrialization. But staccato bans are not enough. Nigeria’s educational system needs a pragmatic overhaul. Pharmacists, engineers and other technical and technological disciplines on their part should review their curricular to make them more empirical and aligned to Nigeria’s industrial aspirations, as a critical step towards forcing government to comprehensively review and decolonize Nigeria’s education. Teaching must cease to be almost wholly theoretical and instead migrate to a system that mandates students, from the very earliest levels, to employ their hands and imaginations to manufacturing medicines, food, tools, equipment, cars, even aircraft, on an industrial basis. Such a visionary curriculum overhaul will require massive cross-sectional support. The Finance Ministry and the Customs and Excise; the National Revenue Service, the Ministries of Health and Education; all of these different segments of government need to buy into a futuristic and ambitious plan that seeks to redress decades of dependence, and transform Nigeria into an industrial powerhouse. This is the way to ensure that the spark that is generated by the ban on paracetamol importation, eventually blossoms into a conflagration, for the benefit of our country.
- Okoruwa initially trained as a pharmacist and works for XLR8, a communications company
