The President, Nigerian Association of Pharmacists and Pharmaceutical Scientists in the Americas, Dr Anthony Ikeme, has called on the Federal Government to develop and execute a blueprint for the economic development of the pharmaceutical industry in the country.

Ikeme said this on Wednesday in Kano while delivering his keynote address on ‘Advancing Industrial Pharmacy Sector in a Volatile Economy,’ at the 23rd Annual National Conference of the Association of Industrial Pharmacists of Nigeria.

He said a long overdue blueprint has become more pressing following the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, which had further exposed the inherent weaknesses in the nation’s health care system.

“Perhaps our greatest failure is in the lack of an actively executed National Strategy for Nigeria’s Pharmaceutical Economic Sector Development. Nigeria must come up with a deliberate and actively executed National Strategy for Pharmaceutical Economic Sector Development. Nothing less will do.

“The Nigerian pharma market is a market for foreign products with almost total dependence on imports from China and India worth an estimated $600m yearly. We must robustly and efficiently deploy all facets of our national human resource asset and machinery towards achieving our national pharmaceutical sector strategy,” Ikeme said.

The NAPPSA president explained that such bold step was needed to ensure the country develop a robust and globally competitive pharmaceutical sector that could take advantage of the coronavirus-induced global supply deficiencies.