A Nation of Fakes: How Counterfeit Culture Became Normal in Nigeria

Somewhere in Nigeria right now, perhaps in Aba, Lagos, Onitsha, or Kano, a small team is putting the finishing touches on a product for Nigerians to consume. There is nothing remarkable about where this product is made. It may not even be a factory, it could be a locked shop, or a one-bedroom apartment that serves as a workshop, warehouse, and production space.

Someone is filling bottles. Someone else is printing labels. Another person is sealing packages. Then they place a familiar logo on the product. A logo of a brand Nigerians already trust, on a product people already buy.

 There is one problem: it isn’t the real thing.

On Monday morning, it will make its way into the markets. A roadside shop, an Instagram page, a WhatsApp status, or a supermarket in your neighbourhood. You may buy it. You may even consume it. And you may never know. That is the terrifying thing about Nigeria’s counterfeit-goods epidemic.

We used to laugh at Nigerian counterfeits. There was a time when counterfeit goods were almost a joke. I recall getting “Abibas” sneakers during my first year in university. My friends laughed at it and I laughed too. We laughed because the fake was obvious. It was embarrassing, but harmless.

Counterfeiting in Nigeria is not new, nor did it begin with  the recent wave of concern about fake food and drinks. The country has been fighting counterfeit and substandard products for decades. In 1990, for example, a paracetamol poisoning incident caused the deaths of 109 children. When Dora Akunyili took over NAFDAC in 2001, fake drugs and goods were already openly circulating in the country.

Between 2001 and 2008, Akunyili led the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and became internationally recognized for her campaign against counterfeit and substandard medicines. NAFDAC conducted raids, shut down illegal operations, seized and destroyed counterfeit products, and made the public feel involved. It used radio and television jingles, published lists of counterfeit products in newspapers and encouraged Nigerians to report suspicious medicines.

During her time, the agency demonstrated something that Nigeria sometimes forgets: regulation only works when regulators are willing and empowered to regulate. Her work ensured that the agency became associated with enforcement rather than paperwork and occasional appearances in the news. The public understood that counterfeit products or medicine wasn’t just “bad business.” They could kill.

Akunyili’s campaign also earned her widespread recognition, even as she faced threats and survived an assassination attempt in 2003. However, her success should not be mistaken for the disappearance of the problem. Counterfeiting survived Akunyili because it was not just a regulatory problem. It was an economic activity, a consumer behaviour and a cultural habit. The problem did not end when she left NAFDAC. It continued to adapt.

Today, the challenge is harder for consumers to see. The fake product no longer has to look ridiculous. It can have convincing packaging, a copied registration number, a familiar brand name and sophisticated distribution channels. 

In 2023, NAFDAC reported destroying 135 truckloads of counterfeit and expired products worth approximately ₦16 billion. In August 2025, the Federal Ministry of Information reported that NAFDAC seized 10,000 cartons of fake goods in a Lagos market. These numbers don’t reflect the full size of Nigeria’s counterfeit economy. They are only what authorities found. A seizure is mere evidence of what was caught, not what exists.

However, something changed in 2025. Nigerians started doing something regulators failed to do. They started exposing their own experiences. Across X (formerly Twitter) and other social platforms, Nigerians shared stories and photographs of products they believed were fake or adulterated.

What made the conversations disturbing was the variety. People reported suspected fake food products, drinks, cooking oil, cosmetics, and household products. The conversation became so widespread that it began to feel like a pattern. That pattern has continued till now. In May 2026, Premium Times described the situation bluntly: Nigerians were increasingly confronting fake wine, soft drinks, food, medicines, and even bottled water.

Social media has become an unofficial consumer-alert system. A person buys a product and notices something is off. They post about it, and someone else responds “Wait! I bought the same thing,” and soon others join and they start investigating a product that no regulator had publicly warned them about. The ineffectiveness of the regulatory system has turned Nigerians into forensic analysts investigating whether they bought a counterfeit product or not.

The problem with counterfeiting is not only that fake products exist. It is also that we have gradually become accustomed to the possibility that almost anything can be fake. We have developed a certain tolerance for the sharp guy who can find a way around a regulation. We admire the person who can “sort” a problem, beat a system or make money from an opportunity others missed. In other circumstances, this ingenuity can be likened to innovation. But when the same attitude is applied to consumer safety, it becomes dangerous. A fake designer handbag can ruin your steeze. A fake phone charger can damage your device. But a fake drug can kill you. A contaminated food product can poison you slowly. A counterfeit electrical component can cause a fire. 

The counterfeiter is not always pictured as someone doing something totally wrong. Sometimes he is simply the person who “knows where to get it cheaper.” The seller may know the product is fake. The buyer may suspect it is fake. Both parties may still complete the transaction because the immediate benefit feels more important than the distant consequence. This is how a crime becomes a culture.

There is also a persisting resistance to consequences. We often become outraged when counterfeit products hurt us, but are less interested in the smaller decisions that allow the market to survive. The person selling the fake product may be condemned when caught, while the person knowingly buying it because “e cheap pass the original” is treated with greater sympathy.

To solve this problem, we must intersect culture and regulation. Nigeria’s regulatory framework already gives NAFDAC responsibility over food, drugs and other regulated products, while other agencies have overlapping responsibilities for standards, customs, competition and consumer protection.

Regulation in Nigeria today, exists mostly as  law. A registration number or a seizure report will always struggle to compete with a counterfeit economy that operates in the everyday spaces where Nigerians shop. People need to know what regulators are doing. They need to know what products have been flagged. They need to know where to report suspicious products. Most importantly, they need to believe that when they report something, somebody will act.

This is part of what made Akunyili’s NAFDAC so memorable. The agency told stories about the effects of fake  drugs. It put the issue on television and radio. It published names. It encouraged tip-offs. It made the fight visible. 

The result was not simply fear of NAFDAC. It was public participation. That connection feels weaker today. NAFDAC still conducts seizures and issues public alerts, and its current systems allow consumers to verify registered products and report suspicious ones. But the existence of a regulatory system is not the same as the public feeling connected to it.

We must also tell ourselves an uncomfortable truth. Poverty helps the counterfeit economy. There is a reason counterfeit products find consumers. The World Bank estimated that in 2025, 52.5% of Nigerians were living in poverty, with high prices and low labour incomes contributing to a reduction in households’ purchasing power. In this situation, cheaper counterfeit products can become more attractive to consumers who are struggling to afford genuine alternatives.  

Nigeria cannot tell millions of people: “Stop buying fake products.”

What happens when the original product costs ₦10,000 and the average consumer can only afford ₦6,000? Someone will supply the ₦6,000 product. And if Nigerian businesses cannot legally and profitably produce affordable alternatives, someone who isn’t qualified to, will. Nigeria needs to make the real thing easier to produce. If we want to cripple the counterfeit economy, we must create an economy where legitimate production is easier to achieve, cheaper to buy, and evenly distributed across the country. This is not just about giving “Made in Nigeria” speeches. The government needs to make manufacturing easier by providing stable electricity, simpler taxation, lower machinery costs, easy access to raw materials, stable exchange rates, proper product certification and regulation, and financing for small businesses to move from trading to manufacturing. If a small Nigerian business can manufacture quality soap, cosmetics, food, clothing, household products, or components at affordable prices, it has no real reason to build its business around imitation.

According to NBS data, Nigeria’s manufacturing sector accounted for only 8.05% of real GDP in 2025. A manufacturing sector this limited makes it harder for the country to meet the needs of its large and growing consumer base with quality products. We need to produce quality products. And we need to produce quality products that people can actually afford. 

But manufacturing alone will not solve a cultural problem. We also have to decide what kind of behaviour we reward.

The government must enforce safety standards. Regulators must communicate better. Manufacturers must protect their brands and maintain quality. Consumers must be willing to question suspiciously cheap products and report them. And the people who knowingly manufacture and distribute fakes must face consequences that are serious enough to make the business less attractive.

Counterfeiting is a culture of deceit. A society that becomes comfortable with counterfeit products risks becoming comfortable with counterfeit standards. We must intensify the fight against this disease at all costs.

Somewhere tonight, someone is probably manufacturing a fake product. The question is not whether Nigeria has counterfeiters. We have always had them. The question is whether we have built a society in which counterfeiting is harder to do, harder to sell and harder to excuse. And perhaps, more importantly, whether we can rebuild the kind of public trust that made Nigerians feel that the fight against fakes belonged to them too.