At the Mile 1 market in Port Harcourt, a palm oil seller with eleven years on the job will tell you about “colouring”, a trick some suppliers use to make pale oil look freshly pressed. She insists she doesn’t sell it herself. But she cannot say, with certainty, which of her neighbours do. That uncertainty, multiplied across thousands of stalls in thousands of open markets nationwide, is now, officially, nobody’s direct responsibility.
That is the real story behind NAFDAC’s admission this week that it has no “direct and absolute regulatory oversight” over unbranded palm oil, fufu, and other staple foods sold in open markets. Strip away the bureaucratic language, and here is what it means for the ordinary Nigerian family: the food on your table tonight may be regulated by nobody at all.
This is not a minor technicality. Palm oil and fufu are not fringe products, they are the backbone of the Nigerian diet, eaten in nearly every household, every day. When NAFDAC’s director-general, Mojisola Adeyeye, confirms that adulteration with hazardous dyes and bleach is occurring in these staples, she is describing a public health emergency hiding in plain sight, one meal at a time. The damage from azo dyes and industrial bleach is not always immediate, it accumulates: in the liver, in the kidneys, in cells that mutate quietly over years. A family that cannot afford hospital bills today is being set up to face far larger ones tomorrow, and they will not always know why.
And yet Adeyeye’s own words indict the system as much as the counterfeiters: “Counterfeiters are not ghosts; they exist within our communities, neighbourhoods, and business premises.” If that is true, then the failure is not one of detection but of will. NAFDAC knows where the markets are. State governments know where their local government areas are. Somewhere between federal regulation and community enforcement, staple foods slipped into a gap that everyone can see and no one is required to close.
225 complaints in a single month is not evidence of a system working, it is evidence of Nigerians shouting into a void, because a complaint line is not enforcement, and enforcement is not oversight.
The solution is not another awareness campaign. Nigeria has tried that with calcium carbide-ripened fruit since 2018, and the practice persists. What is needed is a clear, published division of responsibility: state ministries of health and local government sanitation authorities must be given explicit statutory power, and funding, to inspect open markets, backed by NAFDAC’s technical support, not its absence.
Until that happens, a counterfeit selling stall, and thousands like it, will remain a blind spot in the system, and every household buying from it is gambling with their health on a loophole no one in government has bothered to close.
