Parallel to the killers in the chemical laboratories are the architectural destroyers in our socio-political spheres – academic degree forgers, personality misrepresenters, and genealogy manipulators. While the fake pharmaceutical manufacturer destroys the citizen medically, the credential forger destroys the state subliminally, plunging the nation into an abyss of institutional decay and moral darkness. To save Nigeria from imminent collapse, we must strip away the layers of societal hypocrisy that separate these crimes. If the merchant of fake drugs deserves the ultimate punishment, then the political or professional counterfeiters who forge their way into power deserve nothing less. The law must evolve to recognize that all forms of forgery are inherently homicidal to national survival, and the death penalty must be applied across both divides.
By Promise Adiele
A dangerous, corrosive wind of fakery, forgery, and identity misrepresentation is currently hovering over Nigeria, threatening to tear down the country’s moral, institutional, and physical structures. Among these criminal enterprises, the most immediately terrifying is the rise of counterfeit pharmaceutical and edible item manufacturers. Words fail to accurately capture the sheer level of sadism required to deliberately manufacture fake life-saving medications, clone infant formulas, or adulterate staple foods, push them into the open market for unsuspecting citizens to consume. These perpetrators are not mere white-collar criminals or business opportunists. They are agents of death, institutional murderers, and demons operating from a place of absolute depravity. Yet, as devastating as the physical body count of counterfeit manufacturing is, it represents only one head of a multi-headed hydra.
Parallel to the killers in the chemical laboratories are the architectural destroyers in our socio-political spheres – academic degree forgers, personality misrepresenters, and genealogy manipulators. While the fake pharmaceutical manufacturer destroys the citizen medically, the credential forger destroys the state subliminally, plunging the nation into an abyss of institutional decay and moral darkness. To save Nigeria from imminent collapse, we must strip away the layers of societal hypocrisy that separate these crimes. If the merchant of fake drugs deserves the ultimate punishment, then the political or professional counterfeiters who forge their way into power deserve nothing less. The law must evolve to recognize that all forms of forgery are inherently homicidal to national survival, and the death penalty must be applied across both divides.
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There is currently no village or marketplace in Nigeria where one can escape the omnipresent threat of counterfeit commodities. From popular premium whiskies, brandies, and wines to essential household items like vegetable oil, canned foods, and even table salt, the market is saturated with toxic duplicates. Even the most basic dietary staples, such as rice, beans, and palm oil, are routinely adulterated with hazardous chemical dyes and industrial bulking agents to maximize profit. For the average Nigerian, every meal has become an unconscious romance with the angel of death. While innocent citizens develop acute hepatic failure, renal collapse, and sudden cardiac arrest from consuming these poisons, the manufacturers of these items smile to the bank. They use this blood money to purchase fleets of flashy cars and erect sprawling mansions in towns and ancestral villages alike.
The tragedy is starkest in our pediatric wards, where countless infants have paid the supreme price after consuming counterfeit baby food devoid of nutrients and laced with lethal contaminants. Our public and private hospitals are permanently congested with patients of all ages battling varying degrees of organ failure. These are not natural epidemiological anomalies. They are man-made atrocities, systematically inflicted by greedy citizens in their morbid, unchecked search for material fulfilment. The scale of this domestic chemical warfare has forced regulatory bodies to adopt a fiercer approach.
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has aggressively pushed for an overhaul of existing frameworks, demanding life imprisonment or the death penalty for individuals convicted of manufacturing and distributing counterfeit regulated products. This stance has found absolute solidarity within the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN), which maintains that those who systematically execute people through toxic commerce have forfeited their own right to live. When a crime transitions from economic sabotage to premeditated mass murder, the punitive measures must scale accordingly.
The societal outrage directed toward fake drug manufacturers is entirely justified, yet it exposes a profound blind spot in the Nigerian collective psychology. A distinct segment of the populace gleefully condemns the pharmaceutical counterfeiter while simultaneously defending, rationalizing, or celebrating the political elite who parade forged academic credentials and fabricated identities. This compartmentalization is a fatal error in judgment. The individual who wakes up and decides to clone a life-saving antibiotic is driven by the same depraved, malicious spirit as the individual who sits down to forge a university degree or a National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharge certificate. Both operate on absolute deception, an utter contempt for truth, and a willingness to compromise systemic safety for personal aggrandizement.
When an unqualified individual forges a medical degree, a structural engineering license, or an accounting certification, they insert a ticking time bomb into society. The fake engineer builds collapsed infrastructure, the fake doctor kills patients on the operating table, the fake public official enacts policies that plunge millions of citizens into artificial poverty, structural inflation, and socioeconomic ruin. Therefore, we must confront the uncomfortable question – what truly is the difference between the criminal who kills fifty people through a bad batch of syrup, and the political actor who leads fifty million people into systemic devastation by forging their credentials, manipulating their genealogy, and misrepresenting their character to hijack state power? The latter operates on a grander scale of destruction, yet they are routinely granted soft landings, judicial technicalities, and ethnic shields.
Because the Nigerian state has historically paid lip service to prosecuting high-profile forgery, the culture of deception has trickled down into every stratum of our national life. It has permeated our collective consciousness, transforming dishonesty from a punishable vice into an admired survival strategy. Today, the secondary and tertiary academic landscapes are buckling under the weight of this normalization. Students routinely employ tech-savvy syndicates to forge West African Examinations Council (WAEC) and Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) results, viewing the process as a legitimate shortcut to advancement. The forgery of school fee receipts, bursary documents, and clearance stamps has become a common practice across campuses, starving institutions of critical funding.
The NYSC discharge certificate – once a sacred symbol of national service – has been reduced to a trivial piece of paper that can be bought, cloned, or bartered from roadside business centers. Even when foreign academic institutions issue public disclaimers denying the graduation claims of highly placed Nigerian, the public response is not collective outrage. Instead, it is a circus of media rationalizations, ethnic defense alignments, and political spin. By constantly looking away and moving on, we have house-trained criminality. We have created a society where the daring nature of the fraudster is romanticized as smartness, while adherence to ethical standards is mocked as naivety. This breakdown completely erodes public confidence, nullifies meritocracy, and destabilizes the foundational moral fabric required to keep a multi-ethnic nation cohesive.
This systemic hypocrisy is not entirely new. It is a structural relapse into the cultural failures of the 1970s and 1980s. During that era, Nigeria faced an unprecedented wave of violent armed robbery in the wake of the civil war. The military government responded with raw, visible force – armed robbers were captured, tied to wooden stakes on public beaches, and executed by firing squad before cheering crowds. However, while the state was making a public spectacle of the robber with the gun, it deliberately ignored, excused, and validated a far more dangerous predator – the robber with the pen.
The bureaucratic elite who sat in air-conditioned offices, embezzling millions of naira meant for public healthcare, roads, and education, were never tied to the stakes. Instead, they were celebrated by their communities, granted prestigious traditional chieftaincy titles, and given front-row seats in places of worship. Nigeria executed the petty thief but worshipped the grand kleptocrat. That historic error directly birthed the infrastructural decay and economic displacement that all contribute to the country’s malaise. Today, we are repeating that exact sequence of mindless sophistry. We are preparing the gallows for the uneducated producer of fake gin, while laying out the red carpet for the sophisticated political actor who forged his way into high office. In Nigeria today, we have fake lawyers, fake doctors, fake engineers, fake professors, fake bishops, fake graduates and fake students. The list is endless.
If Nigeria is to survive this self-inflicted existential crisis, it must completely discard this fragmented approach to justice. We cannot negotiate with evil using the broken instruments of psychological self-deception. A holistic, unyielding, and completely blind legal framework must be established to treat all forms of counterfeiting as treasonous assaults on human life. The law must be updated to ensure that anyone found guilty of manufacturing, importing, or distributing fake pharmaceutical and edible goods faces death by execution, as their actions constitute deliberate, mass chemical homicide.
Simultaneously, the statutory punishments for academic, identity, and jurisdictional forgery -especially when committed by public servants, political aspirants, or high-level public officers must be elevated to the same status. The state must send a clear signal – whether you kill a citizen through a toxic bottle of syrup or kill the nation’s future by compromising its institutions with a fake certificate, your punishment will be identical. We must attack the mindset of rationalization head-on, stripping away ethnic, religious, and political shields from every class of counterfeiter. Only when the penalty for forgery is made absolute and terrifying will the marauding spirit of fakery break its hold over our nation, allowing a new dawn of truth, merit, and institutional integrity to finally emerge.
