Our Guests and news on Afro-Leo
We are also delighted to announce that our beloved Afro-Leo is leaner and fitter following an intensive IP hunting course run by WIPO! Check him out alongside..
"The CDM is supervised by the CDM Executive Board (CDM EB) and is under the guidance of the Conference of the Parties (COP/MOP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
One of the intentions in the creation of the CDM was to bolster Africa through technology transfer, community-level development benefits, enhanced private-sector investment and market development. Given the huge need for resources to support sustainable development plans in the region, and the seemingly large potential for CDM activities there, one might expect Africa to be a very active participant in the CDM.
However, the reality is the extreme opposite. Projects in Africa that had successfully journeyed through the formal procedures for developing and registering a CDM project numbered four by December 2005.
There were over 200 projects in various stages of development by this time, of which only a handful were in Africa.
Today, Africa has only 214 CDM projects most of which are either in South Africa or in the Northern parts of the continent".
"This acquisition furthers our intention of building on the essence of our brand, which reflects our vision of becoming an even stronger international force within the coatings industry and a world-class multinational company that is commercially, socially and environmentally responsible".
The truth of the matter is that, so long as the profit to be derived from the sale of products outstrips the profit to be derived from increasing value of the goodwill in a brand and then leveraging it, companies will be more tempted to relabel their products than to encourage the belief that medicines made under their names and brands are reliable." ... Insecticide is used to destroy insects and protect lives and crops. A mosquito bite often means death in Nigeria. The gutters are swollen and stinking during the rainy season and mosquitos cannot imagine their good luck. Health ministries sprayed stagnant pools of water with insecticide in the past but not any more. It is a new Nigeria of fallen standards, selfishness and stolen wealth.
The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) has accused a Lagos chemical company of something worse than selfishness. The agency accused the company of knowingly and coolly breaking the law, of endangering the financial health of farmers and the well-being of Nigerians.
NAFDAC’s Deputy Director, Regulatory Affairs, Mrs. Ariz Madukwe, said at a news conference last week that the company changed both the dates of manufacture and expiry of an insecticide called Endocap. The chemical is used to keep insects away from crops.
The senior NAFDAC official said the insecticide was manufactured in April 2006 and had a potent shelf life of two years. Any unsold stock should have been withdrawn at the end of April, but the company was caught relabelling the product. The company is now claiming that the product was manufactured in January 2008, though it was to expire in April. The new expiry date for a product manufactured in 2006 was now January 2010.
The company is apparently a well established one. It has offices on Victoria Island and a warehouse in Ikeja. NAFDAC said the company was engaged in the criminal alteration of the expiry date of Endocap at its warehouse.
Will the Endocap caper lead to the deserved end of the company? Not likely. Though NAFDAC’s deputy director of regulatory affairs said workers of the chemical company were caught, relabelling the product, nobody was apparently arrested. The company was merely sealed off. The company might have been engaged in the criminal alteration of the expiry date of its brand of insecticide for many years before NAFDAC was tipped off.
There are drug companies in Nigeria set up to manufacture or sell unwholesome drugs. They have foreign collaborators. One Italian pharmaceutical company was set up to manufacture and export useless drugs to developing countries, especially those in Africa. The company said it was doing Africans a favour after it was exposed by the London Sunday Times. It said Africans could not afford efficacious drugs. The company was closed down by the Italian authorities following an international outcry.This happened in the 1980s, at a time Nigeria had no drug regulatory authorities to speak of. Expired drugs were shipped to the country and they were openly sold in pharmacies and patent medicine shops. A pharmacist was arrested for selling expired drugs, but he was not tried. His pharmacy was reopened after being shut for a few days.
Babies died in a teaching hospital after being given medicine for cold. Their parents wept while the manufacturer of the drug of death laughed while cuddling their blood money. There was an enquiry that avoided apportioning blame.
The coming of Professor Dora Akunyili as Director General of NAFDAC halted the haughty stride of the merchants of death. Adulterated or expired drugs were seized and burnt. Markets where dangerous drugs were sold were sealed off for a time.
Bad medicines make millions for the manufacturers and they fought back. They burnt down two or three NAFDAC laboratories and attacked some of the agency’s staff members. Some people were charged with trying to murder Professor Akunyili.
It is the only trial of people suspected of manufacturing, adulterating or selling harmful drugs as far as we know. And they were tried for attempted murder with the use of a gun and not the killing of unsuspecting patients who take poisonous or non-potent drugs.
Why has nobody been convicted of manufacturing or selling unwholesome drugs? Has it to do with the absence of the necessary laws? Or is their enforcement the problem? Is NAFDAC being given the security and legal assistance that it needs?
Punishments should swiftly follow crimes, especially when the lives of hundreds of thousands of people are deliberately put at risk by people seeking easy riches. NAFDAC should make an example of the owners of the company that altered the expiry date of Endocap, its brand of insecticide.
A mosquito may not be blamed, but those who manufacture or sell dangerous drugs and chemicals deserve to be jailed".
"The videos that are the subject of this application are not counterfeit or pirated copies of Knocked Up; they are copies which were made in the US by or with the permission of the copyright owner".Mr Video has agreed to stop importing DVDs until the conclusion of the court case, which will be heard on 30 April.
"“Education”, “synergy”, “building partnerships”, “network building”, “renewed commitments”: this is how Africa is going to develop science, technology and innovation – at least according to the half a dozen distinguished ministers from around the continent who spoke at the conference on Wednesday this week. They did not address, however, why spending on R&D is less than 1% of GDP in most African countries or why, as Professor Edward Ayensu of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research in Ghana pointed out in a well-received speech, why there had apparently been little progress since 1986, when he chaired a conference that promised much the same thing: “We pay lip-service to science and technology but don’t do anything about it … without science and technology we will never develop.”
A slightly different agenda emerged at the final conference session on Thursday, in a presentation called IdeaSolution, organised by BrainStore (who comes up with these absurd compound names?) which is “built on sound logic and Swiss precision” (their words not mine). In real-time, the 700 or so scientists, administrators and lobbyists attending the conference voted on 20 radical ideas to promote science in the continent, including an Olympic Science Games, an African science TV channel and a tax on luxury goods to fund R&D. The top three ideas, when the votes were counted, were:* one sponsored science kit for every school (sponsored by who -- and what if they had an agenda?)
* an African Research Yearbook and
* advice on patenting indigenous knowledge (surely this would need some thought about novelty and prior art, not to mention the costs of protection and enforcement?).
This exercise did at least show that delegates are aware that IP has a key role in discussions about science in Africa, and especially one of the main failures so far – turning successful research into commercial innovation. Fittingly, “patents, IPR and technology transfer” was one of the plenary sessions and included five varied presentations – although there was probably little that would be news to readers of this blog. We heard how ARIPO offers protection in 16 countries and has recently offered a cut-price utility model to benefit SMEs, as well as providing training; how issues such as traditional knowledge and fair use are being discussed internationally; how studying patent documents can help businesses plan their strategies and innovate; and how technology transfer – if managed properly – can provide win-win benefits. There was also a mention of the new Pan-African Intellectual Property Organization (PAIPO) although I haven’t found anyone yet who really knows what it is doing or how it relates to other organizations.
Apart from one question, which wasn’t adequately addressed, there was surprisingly little criticism of IP rights or calls for alternative models. This may have been because those attending were IP standard bearers or it may have been because the Q&A session was moderated by Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, a highly distinguished heart surgeon but by his own admission not well-acquainted with the subtleties of IP arguments. He pressed the speakers with questions about publication and the grace period, but they could not give him a uniform answer.
Despite superficial disorganization (a schedule that bore little resemblance to the published programme and which always seemed to be running an hour late) the organizers (UN ECA and African Union) remarkably produced not only a nine-page draft summary of the meeting in two languages, with 24 action points, but also a CD, distributed to all delegates before the conference closed.
Two of the 24 points related to IP: “(1) ARIPO, OAPI and PAIPO and the national IPR bodies should embark on intensive capacity building and awareness raising campaigns in IPR and patent issues; (2) African countries and their respective institutions should enhance their role as custodians of the governance of Africa’s indigenous knowledge and traditional artefacts by enforcing protection laws related to IPRs.” Nothing too revolutionary there. The Nigerian representative at the conference made some astute comments about what the draft summary said about IP, in particular that TRIPs was not mentioned, that protection in many countries is weak rather than strong and that patents should be seen as a separate issue from traditional knowledge.
This was a diverse conference, covering everything from IT to climate change, malaria drugs to transport. Perhaps too diverse. But the message was clear, and in the light of international focus on and investment in Africa, not to mention the Gates Foundation’s millions, it is well-timed: if Africa is to develop and address its health and environmental challenges, science should play a part. To do so, research needs to be commercialized, and as many speakers pointed out, that requires effective IP protection as well as venture funding and basic infrastructure. The most interesting presentation I heard was by Professor Peter Singer, who has led a study in three countries which suggests that research and commercialization are proceeding on “parallel tracks” in his words, both progressing but never meeting. That, he argued, needs to change (and he has some interesting proposals on how it can do so). I chatted to many of the delegates here, but did not meet a single African businessman/woman (among multinationals, I met one representative of big pharma; Microsoft was a sleeping sponsor; and someone from Nokia gave an interesting talk). When a conference like this attracts people from the private sector (whether factory owners, shopkeepers, pharmacists, grocers or even farmers) who want to use science to grow, then perhaps we will see some progress".