Anyakora’s Pharmacity and Nigeria’s Pharma Future -By Patrick Iwelunmor

There is a familiar rhythm to how we talk about Nigeria’s pharmaceutical industry. We gather in conference halls, speak with urgency, nod in agreement, and for a moment, it feels like something is about to shift. Then the conversations end, the lights dim, and we return to a system that remains stubbornly unchanged. It is within that cycle that Professor Chimezie Anyakora’s intervention begins to feel less like another policy contribution and more like a quiet refusal to keep pretending that structure and outcome are not fundamentally misaligned. At the 3rd Pharma West Africa Conference in Lagos, his keynote, Building Regional Manufacturing Hubs and Incentives for Local Production, did not arrive with theatrical force but with clarity, the kind that unsettles precisely because it removes the comfort of ambiguity and forces a closer look at what has long been normalised.

His “Pharmacity” concept, an integrated pharmaceutical estate housing 20 to 50 companies within a shared ecosystem of infrastructure, regulation, logistics, and research, is not simply an industrial design proposal; it is an indictment of fragmentation disguised as structure. It exposes a system in which each manufacturer is forced to independently solve the same problems—power generation on an unstable grid, laboratory setup in a capital-intensive environment, compliance navigation across multiple regulatory touchpoints, logistics in a strained supply chain—as though repetition were efficiency rather than a duplication of burden. The argument is unsettling in its simplicity: what we call industry resilience may in fact be institutionalised inefficiency.

And the consequences of that inefficiency are not abstract. They move quietly into everyday life, into pharmacies where essential medicines are intermittently available, into hospital wards where substitutions are made not on clinical preference but on supply realities, into homes where treatment decisions are shaped by cost and access rather than certainty. Nigeria still depends heavily on imported medicines despite having over a hundred registered pharmaceutical manufacturers, a contradiction that has become so routine it risks being mistaken for inevitability. But normalisation does not erase fragility; it merely hides it until disruption exposes it again.

This is where Anyakora’s broader body of work becomes essential to understanding the weight of his argument. Through Bloom Public Health, his interventions have consistently focused on the less visible architecture of the health system—particularly pharmaceutical quality assurance, supply chain integrity, and the persistent gaps that allow substandard and falsified medicines to circulate. These are not peripheral concerns; they are direct consequences of fragmentation. When oversight is dispersed, when testing capacity is uneven, when regulatory enforcement is stretched across distance and delay, quality becomes inconsistent by design rather than by exception. Pharmacity, in this sense, is not only about industrial clustering; it is about compressing the space in which failure can occur.

His presentation at the conference made this connection more explicit by situating manufacturing within a shared infrastructure logic. In his framing, integrated hubs would bring manufacturers, regulators, researchers, logistics providers, and service firms into a single coordinated environment where compliance is not episodic but continuous, and where quality assurance is not outsourced but embedded. Shared laboratories would replace duplicated investment across firms; centralised utilities would reduce operational fragmentation; and proximity to regulators would shorten the distance between production and oversight. The implication is not merely efficiency but transformation in how trust is produced within the system.

The urgency of this argument is sharpened when placed against recent disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic did not create Nigeria’s pharmaceutical vulnerabilities; it revealed them in real time. Global supply chains tightened, imports became uncertain, and foreign exchange volatility turned procurement planning into speculation. Medicines that were assumed to be available became unpredictable, and in that moment, dependence stopped being a policy concern and became a lived vulnerability. What followed was not a temporary disruption but a sustained reminder that access to essential medicines cannot be outsourced without consequence.

Yet the deeper tension is that Nigeria is not without capacity. There are more than a hundred registered manufacturers, technical expertise exists, and policy discourse increasingly acknowledges the need for self-sufficiency. The problem is not absence but dispersion. Capacity exists in fragments that do not reinforce one another, producing effort without consolidation and activity without systemic strength. This is why the hub model carries weight beyond infrastructure design; it is an attempt to convert scattered capability into coordinated capacity.

Even the policy implications reflect this need for alignment. Incentives in isolation—tax reliefs, foreign exchange access, duty waivers, regulatory streamlining—do not produce structural change unless they operate as a coherent system. Anyakora’s argument, consistent across his engagements, is that industrial transformation requires policy synchronisation rather than policy accumulation. Without that coherence, each intervention becomes a layer added to an unchanged foundation.

There is also a broader economic horizon embedded in his intervention. The African Continental Free Trade Area is often framed as an opportunity for expansion, but expansion without competitiveness is limited in effect. For Nigeria to participate meaningfully as a producer rather than a consumer within that framework, it must be able to manufacture at scale, at consistent quality, and at competitive cost. That transition cannot be achieved through incremental improvement alone; it requires structural reconfiguration of how production itself is organised.

What makes this conversation difficult is not a lack of awareness but the inertia of familiarity. The current system persists not because it is optimal, but because it is known. It is a system that has normalised inefficiency to the point where endurance is mistaken for progress. Anyakora’s intervention disrupts that comfort by reframing what is often treated as a technical challenge into a structural one, and what is treated as structural into something closer to design failure.

In the end, his argument is not simply about pharmaceutical manufacturing. It is about whether Nigeria is willing to move from a system that merely copes to one deliberately constructed to function. The distinction matters because coping is what remains when design has been deferred for too long, and what has been deferred in this case is not another policy adjustment but a fundamental reorganisation of how an industry holds itself together.