Mojisola Adeyeye, Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), has revealed that a sum of N500 million was unaccounted for in the agency during the four months that preceded her appointment in November 2017.
Speaking on Sunday morning on ‘Inside Sources’, an interview programme on Channels Television anchored by Laolu Akande, Adeyeye also said she inherited a debt of N3.2 billion when she assumed the helm of the agency in 2017 in place of Ademola Mogbojuri.
“When I got to NAFDAC, I met N3.2 billion debt; and N500 million was missing between August and November,” she said.
“I asked if they had a capital project. Bear in mind that at that time, N1 million was the equivalent of $2,000; $2,000 multiplied by 500 million. I was coming from the US where you had to work hard to make money.
“If this were the US, NAFDAC would have been declared bankrupt. And the financial house would have been hired to manage our finance, but we did not even have money to hire a financial house. My point is that we have enough endowment in this country to make things better.”
Adeyeye also said she had to cut the running cost of the agency after her appointment.
“We started with Zoom meetings in March 2018, and many people did not like it because of the amount of money involved in Duty Tour Allowances (DTA). But we had to save!
“This was before the pandemic. We had to save. We had to plug the holes where money was gushing from. That is what we’re supposed to do as a nation, and this present government has that opportunity.”
Continuing, Adeyeye said: “Aside from the debt, when I got to NAFDAC, there was so much disunity among the staff. No equipment in the lab, no vehicles for inspection. Not a single director had a laptop in 2017 that NAFDAC bought.”
Just before Adeyeye assumed office as NAFDAC’s substantive DG, her predecessor, Mogbojuri was suspended over an alleged N500 million contract scam.
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Mogbojuri had taken over from Yetunde Oni, who was the agency’s DG for 18 months, having been appointed following the sack of Paul Orhii.
Buhari had removed Orhii from office in February 2016, alongside some other heads of agencies, without stating the reasons, but Orhii had been accused of financial misappropriation a year earlier.
