Dora Akunyili

Dora Nkem Akunyili (14 July 1954 – 7 June 2014) was Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) from 2001 to 2008 (Wikipedia). She was born in Makurdi, Benue State, to a father from Nanka, Anambra State.

She had a personal reason for fighting counterfeit medicines: in 1988 her 21-year-old sister died after being given fake insulin. At NAFDAC she built a team of mostly women pharmacists and inspectors and led a campaign against counterfeit drugs that closed many open-air medicine markets, publicised lists of fake products, and by June 2006 had secured convictions of 45 counterfeiters (Wikipedia).

She went to St Patrick's Primary School, Isuofia, and Queen of the Rosary Secondary School, Nsukka, where she passed with distinction in 1973 and won scholarships from the Eastern Nigerian government and the federal government. She studied pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, graduating in 1978, and earned a PhD in ethnopharmacology in 1985 (Wikipedia). She worked as a hospital pharmacist at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu, lectured at the university, becoming a senior lecturer in 1990, and from 1996 was zonal secretary of the Petroleum Special Trust Fund for the south-eastern states. President Olusegun Obasanjo appointed her to head NAFDAC in 2001.

In 2008 she became Minister of Information and Communications, and resigned on 16 December 2010 to run for the Senate seat of Anambra Central (Wikipedia).

In July 2003, after four children died during heart operations in Enugu, she confiscated the supplies used and found fake adrenaline, fake muscle relaxant and infected drips. Her work raised public awareness of counterfeit medicines and tightened surveillance at Nigerian customs. On 26 December 2003 gunmen fired on her convoy in Anambra State; a bullet passed through her headscarf. She received several international awards for her work in public health and human rights (Wikipedia).