The National Association of Nigerian Medicine Dealers, Abia chapter, says it did not join in the building of Abia State Wholesale Control Centre because it is not invited.
The President, state chapter of NAPMED, Alex Iwuoha, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Aba on Tuesday.
Iwuoha said that NAPMED has no plans to move or join the project as they were yet to be either invited or be informed of the deadline for relocation by drug dealers into marts.
He said: “If the Health Minister, Adewole, gave January 1 as deadline for relocation of drug dealers to drug marts, we have not received such information except as it is being carried in the news.
“Even the people who are taking care of us are not aware of the drug mart being built in Abia.
“Drug dealers are not included in the plan because if they were I would have put myself to work to do what government said we should do.”
The NAPMED president said he was not at the ground breaking ceremony for the centre because the organisers, Enyimba Pharmaceutical and Allied Products Ltd, did not invite NAPMED.
Iwuoha said: “We are an organised body who deal with drugs but they were doing it and refused to invite us so we said that they should continue building so that whenever they complete it and ask us to come over, we go.
“The drug dealers are not part of it. We do not know anything about it.’’
Iwuoha said that the organisers of the project were a handful of drug dealers in conjunction with some politicians in Abia Government, hence their decline to join the project.
According to him, the association had formally complaint to the state government that the project was wrongly handled because it was not done in the name of drug dealers, but government did not act.
He said: “Many of those involved in the project are not drug dealers.
“And because the office I sent my letter to have special interest in what is going on in the planned drug mart project, they did not do anything with that letter.”
He therefore said that NAPMED was not participating in the project, but was watching to see when the project would be completed to move in, if they were invited.
However, Emeka Osuagwu, the President, Ariaria Patent and Proprietary Medicine Dealers Association, said that NAPMED was invited with the conditions of participation spelt out.
Osuagwu noted that it was when NAPMED felt that the requirements for the registration processes for every interested party did not favour them that they declined to join the project.
NAN recalls that the Health Minister, Prof. Isaac Adewole, had during the ground breaking ceremony of the drug mart in Aba announced January 1, 2019, as the deadline for relocation of drug dealers to drug marts nationwide.
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