Tinubu’s paracetamol ban and varsity curricula
How does a country with over 20 pharmacy schools, continue to import paracetamol tablets and syrups in 2026? Should the University of Benin Teaching Hospital, located adjacent to the university’s
- By Calixthus Okoruwa
How does a country with over 20 pharmacy schools, continue to import paracetamol tablets and syrups in 2026? Should the University of Benin Teaching Hospital, located adjacent to 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 to help meet the manpower needs – teachers, civil servants, judicial operatives – of the colonial administration in the face of rapid country growth. As industrialization of its colonies was not on the agenda, there was no emphasis on applied technical training or industrial production.
Paradoxically, since independence, it would appear that in setting up its own universities, Nigeria adopted the colonial model wholesale and failed to truly indigenise these institutions.
This crisis manifests to a large extent, in the white-collar nature of Nigeria’s university education system. In engineering faculties, you will find broken-down and abandoned fans and air conditioners. Neither teacher nor student is able to fix them, because such hands-on tasks are alien to the colonial-styled curriculum that is more aligned to churning out administratively-oriented engineers than inventors and innovators.
The state of Nigeria’s pharmaceutical industry is an even more poignant reflection of the country’s educational crisis. Pharmacy schools continue to run a curriculum that neither recognizes nor appreciates the critical role of pharmacy as 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 mind-set.
Nigeria, however, embodies immense pharmaceutical potential not only on account of its diverse flora and fauna, but also because of the massive economic potential in tending to the health of over 200 million citizens 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 nourish this vibrant industrial pharmaceutical base.
Unfortunately, instead, Nigeria not only imports finished medicines but also the constituents of these medicines including inert excipients like starch. 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 applaud President Tinubu’s recent ban on the importation of paracetamol, a commonly-used pain reliever, alongside a host of other medicines, which can be produced in Nigeria.
The paracetamol importation ban follows in the footsteps of a similar ban on the export of shea-butter nuts. The objective, ostensibly, is to encourage value-addition to shea-butter nuts, especially as Nigeria 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 progressive, staccato bans are not enough. 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. Nigeria’s educational curriculum needs to be radically remodelled and tailored to the country’s industrialization aspirations.
Professional bodies in pharmacy can help to drive government towards such an educational overhaul, by methodically reappraising and remodelling their training curriculum. 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. Such manufacturing operations which will be overseen by regulatory authorities – NAFDAC and the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria – 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.
These manufacturing operations will entrust students, under the supervision of their experienced teachers, with key aspects of research, 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.
The 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, engineering and other industrial-aligned educators must learn from the teaching hospital model to help the country optimize its industrial potential. Today, it is impossible to set up a medical school 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.
Painstakingly implemented, such a hands-on-training 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 would require policy and institutional support. University vice chancellors need to provide take-off funding, infrastructure and other assistance. The ministries of labour and education would also need to evolve special remuneration packages for university teachers involved in these technical-cum-commercial operations.
Read Also: Nigeria needs humanitarian trust fund to tackle poverty – Minister
Very importantly, these pilot manufacturing operations would be expected to compete with commercial establishments and yield a profit to their universities. They may not have been set up primarily for profit but are not expected to be loss-making operations either. This creates the imperative for students, under the guidance of their teachers, to imbibe business management fundamentals very early on in their professional journeys.
Experiential learning in pharmacy, engineering and other industrial disciplines is critical to aligning our educational system with our industrial development aspirations. Professions like pharmacy must now think differently from the colonial masters who created the framework for Nigeria’s tertiary education and decolonize their training curricula.
Teaching must cease to be predominantly theoretical. Rather, it should systematically mandate students, from the very earliest levels, to employ their hands and imaginations to problem-solving, including producing medicines, food, tools, equipment, cars, and even aircraft, at an industrial scale.
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 trained as a pharmacist and works for a communications company.
