The Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency (NNMD) has called for investment in research to boost herbal medicine development in the country.

The agency lamented that Nigeria is creating raw materials for other parts of the world and called for an overhaul of the educational system, to integrate traditional medicine into the educational curriculum.

Director General of the Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency (NNMDA), Prof Martins Emeje, told The Guardian that over 160 million Nigerians use traditional medicine for treatment and other healthcare needs, while the remaining 40 million Nigerians are dependent on imported medicine.

Emeje explained that traditional medicine plays a significant role in addressing public health problems in the country, adding that the major challenge facing the sector is the failure to get traditional medicine to become a priority in research and development by the government and private sector.

He decried Nigeria’s reliance on the importation of orthodox medicine and emphasised the need to develop traditional medicine, which has the capacity to produce not only medicinal products but also the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) being used by the pharmaceutical industry for drug production.

NNMDA said, “Those synthetic products you see in pharmacies and hospitals, 40-60 per cent of them are of plant origin. When people are interested in the importation of medicine, we are not developing our own traditional medicine, but traditional medicines of other countries. The worth of global herbal medicine will hit $347 million in the next five years and increase to $5 trillion next 25 years.”

The Director General called on the government to prioritise traditional medicine and invest in research and development to enable the agency to move the sector to an enviable height as obtainable in many countries.

Emeje noted that traditional medicine has a multiplier effect in terms of job creation and wealth creation because it’s a major source of raw material and the precursor to developing and making traditional medicine an agricultural product.

According to him, Nigeria has the best bone-setting technology in the world but because of lack of attention to the development of health products, services and technologies, “we are losing all of these naturally endowed raw materials.

“If somebody has a complex fracture or even compound fracture, they do amputation in the hospital. No matter how complex a fracture is, traditional bone-setting technology will fix it. Some medical doctors had fractures themselves and it was traditional medicine that fixed it, they did not go to the hospital for amputation.”

Emeje commended the House of Representatives for its unanimous resolution on the need to prioritise natural medicine and urged the National Assembly to put life into the resolution by ensuring that both the private concerns and the government invest in the sector.

He said the agency is working towards establishing herbal medicine centres in all the 774 local governments and developing a database of all traditional medicine practitioners in the country.