For Nigeria’s two 250 million people and multitudes across the “honey” world, the “Africa’s giant” had gained another feat. An infamy of scoring cheap-own-goals. As if we aren’t tired of a run with the unusual! One of our own, the Director General (DG) of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration (NAFDAC), Mojisola Adeyeye, a learned professor of this and that, particularly of Emeritus in Pharmaceutics and Drug Product Evaluation, from the highbrow College of Pharmacy, Roosevelt University, USA, was caught in a windstorm of a key official pronouncement. “DG-NAFDAC”, as her uppermost position is widely called in the country, had made two conflicting statements on the ranging global scourge, the Genetically Modified foods.
Wielding her exalted office as the number one official hunter of fake food and drug and their diehard dealers, Adeyeye had blown hot and then cold, leaving all in palpable confusion about which to believe of the two conflicting statements she had made, debunking public safety concerns. There are over 50 genetically modified (GM) foods, whose spread, consumption and deadliness to humans, continually generates reactions in the country.
Speaking to journalists in August 2025 in Abuja, Prof Adeyeye said vividly: “GMOs are genetically modified foods when it comes to food, and they are not bad for us…, depending on what type of foods they are and whether the safety conditions have been taken”. The same pundits who hailed her earlier comments soon came upon her. “It’s outright praises for the Agama lizard, but not when it adds black feces to the whitish part.
A double-speak, so to say, when in June 2024 Adeyeye uttered that: “We have not registered a single GMO product, because we are sensitive about it. In terms of GMOs, we do not think it is safe…for our own consumption. That is the position of NAFDAC”. Prof Adeyeye, who spoke verbatim in English, had turned around to say she was misquoted. How possible?
But for a spontaneous hue and cry by a coalition of over 80 NGOs, NAFDAC would have eloped with the skewed news headlines and the matter swept under the carpet, like several others. The coalition, led by the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), included Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), the GMO-Free Nigeria Alliance and others.
The coalition, in a press conference, accused the NAFDAC’s boss and the National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA), of failure to produce credible, independent, and long-term studies to justify their position that GM foods are safe for consumption. More tangible issues were raised by subsequent speakers, featuring Dr. Nnimmo Bassey, HOMEF’s Executive Director. He warned of the deadly imports of the GMO foods on quasi agriculture and ecology realms.
“GMOs go beyond health risks, where reports of Nigerian cotton farmers say their soils no longer support conventional crops after three years of planting genetically modified Bt cotton. Herbicide-tolerant GMOs have led to biodiversity loss and the emergence of super weeds, forcing farmers to use more toxic chemicals.”
Prof. Johnson Ekpere, convener of the GMO-Free Nigeria Alliance, queried NAFDAC and NBMA on credible feeding studies to back their claims, citing an Iranian study, where rats that were fed GM soybean oil, suffered significant organ damage. Dr. Ifeanyi Casmir, a medical microbiologist, also raised further alarm over Bt crops such as beans, which release toxins that destroy beneficial soil microorganisms, that have been detected in the blood of pregnant women and fetuses.
The body also emphasised that GMOs threaten Nigeria’s food sufficiency and sovereignty, where durable indigenous seeds give way to GM seeds, which are short-lived and local farmers were discouraged from farming.
There was another conspiracy theory that the current armed insurgencies raging Nigeria were designed to chase farmers away from their farmlands, so that the alternative is for the country to depend on GM foods and technology shipped in from overseas.
Apparently, the more Adeyeye justified her gaffe the more she validated it as a misspeak. Interestingly, Dr. Agnes Yemisi Asagbra, Director General of NBMA, spilled the beans by her insistence “that no GM food permits are issued without NAFDAC’s involvement, and faulting the inadequacy of synergy between her agency, NAFDAC and the supervising Federal Ministry of Health, in corroboration of government’s failure to concretise actions on the GMOs blight”.
Prof Adeyeye’s assertion that NAFDAC hasn’t signed any GMO permit sounded too good to be true. Otherwise, how come that the country witnessed a controversial approval of GM maize imports by WACOT Limited, which obviously had eroded the public trust in the country’s shoddy GMOs pursuit? Will such huge GM products sneak into the country without NAFDAC and NBMA? How does numerous other GM foods find their way into the Nigerian markets? What proactive measures have NAFDAC and NBMA taken to arrest the offenders and serve deterrence?
Dr. Tunji Alausa, the Minister of State for Health, was harassed, lately, into a tripartite fence-mending meeting with NAFDAC and NBMA, by the coalition’s intensity. But a fly in the ointment is Prof Adeyeye insistence, after the meeting, that the choice is left for Nigerian consumers to ascertain whichever GM products they could buy, among countless other foods that are roughly labeled by NAFDAC, where numerous Nigerians are not lettered. Pertinently, how many NAFDAC’s labeled products do Nigerians read before buying, including the numerous that have fake NAFDAC’s labels?
Yet, one could find it unbelievable that Prof Adeyeye, who professed to being a “food freak”, could recommend or label the GM toxic for Nigerians. Did inventors of the COVID 19 vaccine fraud not refuse to administer it on themselves and their dependents, whilst it was meant for others? GM foods are rejected across the globe. Why should Nigeria’s case be different?
There was Prof Dora Akunyili as NAFDAC boss and now a counterpart Adeyeye. When a person who isn’t around is eulogised, as all are still disposed to the late Prof Akunyili, long after her demise, for having given NAFDAC a meaningful direction, it is, therefore, a wake-up call to the incumbent.
Pointedly, the Nnimmo Bassey’s coalition has indicated the way to go. One devoid of landmines. Taking the matter to the Senate, where all GM foods and techniques must be given outright ban, in the country. For Nigerians cannot perpetually under the yoke of overbearing neocolonialist interests, multinational aristocrats and the Bretton Woods’ bitter pills.
By Tony Erha