The National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control NAFDAC, has denied reports making the rounds that some quantities of the regulated pharmaceutical product, Tramadol was seized at the Tin Can Island Port Command.

This denial is against the backdrop of an electronic medium report on Saturday, January 13, 2018, alleging that both agencies allegedly received some consignments of illegally imported Tramadol seized by the Tin Island Command of the Nigeria Customs Service.

Top official of the agency, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that there was no iota of truth in the reports, insisting that no consignment of Tramadol was either seized at the port or handed over to them.

According to the official, who spoke in a telephone interview, all the relevant agencies including Customs, among others participate in the joint examination of imported goods and so ruled out the authenticity of such report.

“All the relevant agencies statutorily empowered to participate in the examination of imported cargo jointly examine all cargo slated for examination and at the end, officers representing the agencies sign the joint examination sheet indicating that they participated in the process and so there is no way such item would be seized without the knowledge of others”, one of the officer said.

He added that it sounds even more ridiculous when the television report alleged that the same consignment had been handed over to NAFDAC and therefore challenged the news medium to come forward with such evidence.

Investigation however showed that that report might be a case of misrepresentation as some consignments of tramadol was seized at the AP Moller Terminal at the Lagos Ports Complex Apapa last week, which have also been handed over to the Apapa Port unit of NAFDAC since last year.

It was further gathered that the Customs Tin Can Island Command has already written the news medium to address the issue of misrepresentation of facts so as not to deceive the public.

Recall that the Tin can Island Port Command of Customs had October last year detected and seized two 40-foot containers with registration numbers MRKU 256545/8 and MSKU 071916/0 falsely declared as used vehicles and computer accessories.

The consignments, which were handed over to officials of NAFDAC on Friday October 20, 2017, consisted of two units of 40-foot containers falsely declared as vehicles, cartons of makeup items and computer accessories.

Customs Area Controller of the command, Comptroller Bashar Yusuf, who spoke on the activities that preceded the seizure, said that the discovery and subsequent seizure of the containers was sequel to the latest operational methodology adopted by the command through profiling, cargo selectivity and system checks of the advance electronic manifest.

According to him, the command is currently adopting these procedures to ensure that all Imports are electronically monitored with a view to identifying non-compliant declarations and other infractions which could jeopardise the change ideology of the service.