Nigeria is drowning in fake everything. Thick, adulterated palm oil. Drinks that don’t taste like drinks. Foods laced with materials nobody can explain. Brands that officially left the country are somehow still flooding shelves nationwide, made by hands nobody can trace. For months, the timeline has been one long horror reel of counterfeit products, and the agency built to stop it has looked, at best, unbothered.
Then on Monday, September 7, at a press briefing in Lagos, NAFDAC Director-General Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye gave Nigerians the moment that broke the internet for the worst reason.
A journalist put it to her plainly: Nigerians are calling for your resignation. She burst into laughter, stood up, and joked about stepping down before sitting back down to tell the room, “I hope you got the answer.”
That clip is now everywhere on the Nigerian internet. And the timeline is not laughing with her. Nigerians under the video are calling the laughter callous, arrogant, tone-deaf; the kind of reaction that only makes sense to someone who believes nothing can touch her. One user summed up the mood bluntly: people are dying while she jokes. Another called it a wicked laugh, the laugh of someone who knows there will be no consequences.
NAFDAC’s own numbers do not help her case. The agency admits it received 225 complaints about suspected counterfeit products in August alone, and mopped up 7,210 fake, falsified, and non-compliant products between May and July. Adeyeye also drew a hard line during the briefing: raw farm produce—oranges, apples, yam—is regulated by the Ministry of Agriculture, not NAFDAC. Only semi-processed and processed goods fall under her agency’s watch. To a country watching its food and drugs turn against it, that line sounded less like clarity and more like an admission of how much is slipping through the cracks.
Nine years into her tenure, Adeyeye insists her record speaks for itself, that she came back from three decades in the US to fix what she calls a “good-for-nothing agency,” and that the resignation calls are resistance to reform. Nigerians online are not buying it. They are not asking for a resume. They are asking why the woman in charge of keeping poison off their plates is laughing while they count the cost.
