Sold by Hand, Bought Without Question (How the Informal Market Contributing to Fake-Products Crisis) -By Kator Ifyalem

There is a specific kind of trust involved in buying from a hawker. No shopfront, no receipt, no return policy, just a hand extended through a car window in traffic, or a tray balanced on a head at a bus park. Nigerians perform this transaction millions of times a day, for drugs, food, and drink. NAFDAC’s language for the people running this trade is blunt, the Director-General called drug hawkers “merchants of death.”

The scale of what moves through that channel is difficult to overstate. In a single set of coordinated raids across Lagos, Kaduna, Abuja, and Asaba, NAFDAC seized hawked pharmaceutical products worth over N110 million and arrested more than fifteen people, aphrodisiacs, oxytocin, tramadol, morphine, sex-enhancement drugs, painkillers, antibiotics, all changing hands with no prescription, no cold chain, and no way for the buyer to verify anything about what they were taking. Separately, an Abuja destruction exercise disposed of over N1.85 billion in drugs “confiscated from hawkers” alongside counterfeit sachet milk and fake insecticides.

An investigation into Nigeria pharmaceutical trade found medicines exposed for hours to sun, rain, and dust on makeshift stalls, sold by vendors with no pharmaceutical training, degrading the active ingredients until, in the words of NAFDAC the medicine turns into poison. The agency states plainly that most of what drug hawkers sell is counterfeit, substandard, or expired, meeting none of the quality or safety requirements of a regulated medicine. A medical doctor quoted in recent coverage tied the organ failure now showing up with unusual frequency, liver failure, kidney failure, infertility, falling sperm counts, directly to chemical contaminants in counterfeit products moving through exactly this kind of channel.

Street-vended food carries its own, separately documented burden. Food vendors preparing food in unclean surroundings with flies present, some stalls sited next to dump sites, and nearly three-quarters failing to wash food properly before cooking. In a particular city, close to a quarter of vendors were observed handling food with no hygiene precautions at all. Surveys have found more than four in five in some places never received any food-safety training nor recognise the term “foodborne disease.” This is the situation across the entire country. Regulatory contact with any of this is close to nonexistent, one study of mobile vendors in Osun found 96.8 per cent reporting no interaction with government authorities whatsoever, despite six in ten reporting occasional illness themselves.

And this is before the chemical adulteration layer. Fruits sold from open trays and roadside stalls are the exact category flagged in the Senate committee’s investigation and in academic surveys, calcium carbide for artificial ripening, sniper for preservation, detergent used to wash produce for a shine. Fruit sellers using calcium carbide and a combination of Gammalin 20, sniper, aluminium phosphide, DDT. None of these products pass through a shop with a NAFDAC number on display. They pass through hands, trays, and open-air stalls, at the exact point of sale where regulation is thinnest and trust is highest.

Layer this together and the picture is not of a few bad actors slipping through the cracks. It is an entire distribution channel, millions of small, cash, face-to-face transactions a day, operating almost completely outside inspection, staffed overwhelmingly by people with no training in what they are handling, moving products that are frequently counterfeit, frequently degraded, and sometimes deliberately poisoned with substances banned specifically because they are known to be dangerous. The volume moving through it every single day, everywhere else, is not something any raid schedule touches.

The tramadol sold through a car window has likely never seen a cold chain. We know the orange sold on that same tray may have been ripened with a chemical that damages kidneys. We know the woman frying akara on the roadside has, more likely than not, never been trained in food safety and has never once been visited by anyone whose job it is to check. And we buy anyway, every day, in numbers no seizure record will ever capture. So the question worth sitting with is not regulatory. It is personal, and national, why are we this desperate to harm ourselves?