By CHIDI MATTHEW NWACHUKWU

The Chairman of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), FCT Chapter, Pharm. Salamatu Orakwelu, has said that the lack of full integration into the health system and poor appreciation of pharmaceutical services are pushing pharmacists out of Nigeria.

Orakwelu, who spoke in Abuja during activities to mark World Pharmacists Day (WPD) 2026 with the theme, Empowering Pharmacists for Healthier Futures, said the current manpower shortage in the sector is a direct consequence of not empowering pharmacists to work to their full capacity.

"When you talk about empowerment, when you look at it from the angle of shortage of manpower, if people are being empowered in terms of working to optimum capacity, they will not be moving away. There are a lot of people that are actually not satisfied. Our services are not being appreciated. We are not fully integrated into the health system," she said.

She said the public still perceives pharmacists as mere custodians and dispensers of medicines, whereas their roles have expanded to health education, counselling, vaccination, identification of medication errors, and promotion of adherence and preventive self-care.

According to her, while pharmacists are the most accessible healthcare professionals in the community, the enabling environment to demonstrate their expertise is lacking.

"We are accessible, we are available at any time. A pharmacist is knowledgeable enough to be able to identify medication errors, from prescribing to dispensing, from monitoring to application," she said.

Orakwelu said empowering pharmacists requires supportive legislation, investment in pharmaceutical development and education, strengthening of the medicine supply chain, and involvement of relevant professional expertise in all policy decisions relating to medicines.

She also decried the continued importation of basic raw materials for drug production despite local capacity, blaming high cost of production, energy, taxes, exchange rate, and regulatory bottlenecks, adding that most government policies to boost local manufacturing remain on paper without implementation.

Earlier, the Registrar of the Pharmacy Council of Nigeria (PCN), Pharm. Ibrahim Babashehu Ahmed, who delivered the keynote address, warned pharmacists against wholehearted reliance on artificial intelligence (AI), saying they will be held accountable for any errors.

"People now run quickly to artificial intelligence to access information. But is that information something you should wholeheartedly rely on? If anything goes wrong, the artificial intelligence space is not going to answer the question, it is going to be you," Ahmed said.

He disclosed that the Council has closed 1,321 illegal medicine shops in the open drug market in Kano and shut the market permanently, with plans to close similar markets in Idumota, Lagos and Head Bridge, Onitsha.

In his remark, the Chairman of the occasion, Dr. Michael Oyebanjo, CEO of Mopson Pharmaceutical Limited, said compounding remains the foundation of pharmacy and called on government to create an enabling environment and supportive regulations that allow young pharmacists to practise and produce for their communities immediately after graduation.

Also speaking, the Chairman of the WPD Planning Committee, Dr. Abubakar Danraka, urged Nigerians to know their pharmacists, describing them as the most trusted healthcare professionals, and called for full implementation of the consultant pharmacist cadre in all federal health institutions.

He said less than 10 of over 150 local drug manufacturers in Nigeria are World Health organization (WHO) pre-qualified, and that if the Presidential Initiative for Unlocking the Healthcare Value Chain (PVAC) is strengthened to support manufacturers to attain pre-qualification, the cost of medicines would drop by over 50 percent.

The World Pharmacists Day (WPD) is celebrated annually on September 25th, with the highlight of the 2026 event being the launch for the completion of the PSN/FCT Secretariat Building.

•PHOTO: PSN/FCT Chapter Chairman, Pharm. Salamatu Orakwelu (third left), flanked by members of the Excos at the 2026 World Pharmacists Day celebration in Abuja