You want to take PCN in a new direction, beginning with a workshop for staff, run by the Administrative Staff College of Nigeria (ASCON).
Few weeks ago, we developed a work plan for the council, which was approved by the board, and we now need to domesticate in various departments and zones of the council. The main target is to enable them set targets for themselves, so they can key into the new vision of the council to achieve maximum results.
What staff cadre are you targeting?
Management staff—directors, deputy directors, head of units and deputies, zonal heads and deputies.
What’s the rationale? Presumably you are better off focusing on the so-called foot soldiers, those in direct contact with the public?
They are the head of brigade, the units. A zonal officer takes care of six states, and then there is a state assistant who will take our messge to the grassroot. The management staff are the first port of call after council’s decision, and they have to buy in. that’s what we are doing now. Thereafter we can scale it downward to zonal and state level.
What sort of performance management do you want to achieve? Considering what council represents in the daily lives of Nigerians, presumably more enforcement would be expected of you.
Performance in terms of service delivery to Nigerians. What are their expectations and how do we ensure those expectations are met. I’m coming from the private sector into public, and ideas in the private sector is driven most especially by target setting. When you engage someone, you engage them for a purpose, and they have to understand that purpose, and you set targets for them, and use the achievement of those targets to assess his performance. That’s the concept we are bringing into the management of public service.
Most of them are not used to that, and I cannot push it down their throats. I have to let them understand and appreciate what it is. That’s why we asked ASCON to come and put a torch on that for us.
One year into your tenure, how would you assess the council’s regulation of pharmacy practice and drug distribution?
PCN is a regulatory body that governs the education and training of personnel in pharmacy practice in Nigeria. There are three major stakeholders: pharmacist, pharmacy technicians and patent medicine licence holders. The first two go through conventional school, where we regulate their training. Patent medicine licence holders don’t go through conventional education setup regulated by PCN, so we try to make them understand and appreciate what the pharmaceutical service is all about. There are two types of individuals in pharmaceutical “business”—those conventionally trained to render services (the pharmacists with B.Pharm and pharmacy technicians) and those who come into this practice for sake of making money. Theirs is to sell drugs and make some money, whereas those are professionally trained render service in order to make money. And that is where the conflict is when it comes to fake drugs, because those really into fake drugs are those who come into the practice to sell drugs and make money without understanding and appreciating what drugs is all about. Their main purpose is money, and that’s the bedrock of fake drugs.
You admit then there are quacks in the practice?
Definitely there are quacks all over the place and we have put up machinery to address that. That’s why we have signed MOUs with patent medicine vendors licence holders, who have before now refused to be regulated. They have gone to court on several cases stopping us from regulating them, and you know what that means to the health of Nigerians. So my first action point is to bring all that needs to be regulated under the regulatory framework of PCN. Pharmacists and technicians are ready to be regulated because they understand what they are into. The patent medicine vendor licence holders mostly in the rural areas have also agreed to be regulated. That is the first step, because in a democratic setting, you need to get them to buy in into regulatory activities. I have reached out to them and I’ve given them a three-month moratorium for everyone to fall in line. And they have all agreed and are doing it. By April we will start enforcement on stakeholders and their services—that is both personnel and premises involved in pharmaceutical services in Nigeria.
