Bianca Iboma

Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, has said the Federal Government will “pump money” into herbal medicines produced in the country in order to solve problems of unemployment and poverty in the country.

Onu stated this during a one-day working visit to the Nigeria Natural Medicine Development Agency (NNMDA) in Lagos.

He said if products usually imported into the country are produced locally, it would provide job opportunities.

“We want to make sure many of the things we import into the country are produce in Nigeria. If we achieve that, it will help us provide job opportunities; so when people graduate from school – whether secondary, polytechnic or university, they will have jobs. And it will help us fight poverty.

“A family, father and mother can start some of these things that we’ve seen here and that is how they’ll be making money and contributing to the growth of the nation,” he said.

Earlier, the minister said NNMDA’s five-year strategic plan is a roadmap on how the agency could help the nation produce herbal products for export.

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NNMDA Director General, Dr. Sam Etatuvie, said one of the ways to achieve the local production of herbal medicines is through training.

“We do trainings for the practitioners across the country because they are the original owners of the traditional medicine knowledge.

“They’ve been passing down this knowledge from generation to generation and many of them are dying.

“We need to train the younger ones and those people to document their traditional medicine knowledge.

“If you do that, you’ll be able to use that to formulate products,” he said.

He disclosed that the agency was making plans to restart the College of Natural Medicine.