My Beauty Best Teacher

Dora Akunyili Director of Nigeria's NAFDAC "...has defied death threats and assasination attempts while tackling corrupt practices in the manufacturing, import and export of drugs, cosmetics and food products. Since taking up her position in April 2001, Dr Akunyili has earned nationwide respect for her persistence in prosecuting illegal drug traders and in imposing strict standards on multinational companies. In particular, she has pursued manufacturers and importers of counterfeit drugs, deemed to be a leading cause of deaths by stroke and heart failure in Nigeria...",Transparency.

Why is it that Nigerian elected officials develop inertia when it’s needed most? This is a question that has become even more relevant given the Yar’Adua’s impasse...I doff my hat to the Nigerian information minister, Dora Akunyili, for her new-found courage and consciousness to the moral contract she has with the people. Her unilateral stance against the deceit and rascality of the Yar’Adua cabal is a refreshing breeze instead of the foul staleness of the Abuja obstructionists and status quo keepers.

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh writes about the Patricia Etteh imbroglio:

...competence cannot be sexualized. Competence is competence. Conviction is conviction. Integrity is integrity. If you did not cultivate it, you cannot flaunt it. It cannot be bought. It is earned. This explains why Dora Akunyili, in stark contrast to Etteh is a summary of probity, integrity and competence. Akunyili daily faces huge temptations from the fake drugs mafia and multinationals merchants of death, whose “businesses” she impedes; to betray her mission for a fee. But this woman of incorruptible principles has stood her grounds. She has challenged and taken the battle to the turf of these crooks...It is only in Nigeria, that an intellectual midget and a morally compromised woman like Mrs. Etteh would become a speaker of the lower house of laws. The horse and goat trading that brought about her emergence is an indictment on the Nigerian political culture. This woman may be a domestic bully, but to handle the complicated tasks of lawmaking in a nascent political environment is beyond the furthest limits of her competence.

The FT reports on the work of Dora Akunyili,Nigeria's Drug Czar:

By the turn of the millennium, Nigerians had become among the world’s most frequent victims of fake drugs. The country’s reputation was so bad that its west African neighbors were refusing to import the medicines that came across its borders. An analysis in 2001 of 2,060 drug samples taken from the large wholesale markets where most medicines are easily bought showed that 62 per cent were not registered with the country’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (Nafdac).

clamping down on hawkers and wholesale drug markets, and pursuing dodgy manufacturers and importers alike. Nor did she flinch from angering powerful people, reprimanding Nestle for importing out-of-date baby milk, closing the bakery of the wife of the former president Ibrahim Babangida for using a carcinogenic bread-enhancing chemical, and even fining one of the current president’s farms for importing chemicals without a permit. But the worst abusers were far more difficult to target. ”The drug people were like gods here,” she says. ”Since 1960, with independence, they became progressively entrenched and terrorised everyone unchallenged. Outside oil, there’s no business as lucrative as drugs.”