Travelling across Africa and around the world can provoke serious reflection. There is something profoundly wrong when products considered unsafe, substandard, adulterated or unacceptable in one market find a ready market in Africa.
They arrive as food, medicines, alcoholic beverages, agricultural products and other consumer goods. Some are merely inferior. Others are counterfeit, falsified, expired, contaminated or deliberately mislabelled. Examples abound. In the worst cases, products that threaten human health are sold to African consumers because unscrupulous operators calculate that regulatory scrutiny will be weaker, enforcement slower and accountability less certain.
This is not simply a problem of trade.
It is a problem of public health, governance, corruption, corporate responsibility and sovereignty.
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Africa must therefore stop treating consumer protection as a secondary administrative matter. The right of a citizen to safe food, effective medicine and properly regulated consumer products should not depend on whether that citizen lives in Kigali, London, Brussels, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Ottawa, Mexico City or New York.
Human health cannot have different values in different markets.
The expression “dumping ground” should not be used carelessly. Africa is not helpless, nor are African consumers passive victims. African governments have the sovereign responsibility to regulate their markets, enforce standards and punish violations.
But precisely because Africa has that responsibility, we must confront an uncomfortable reality: unsafe products can flourish where regulatory systems are weak, fragmented, under-resourced or corrupted.
When rejected products find another market
International trade is legitimate and essential to Africa’s development. The answer is not to close African markets to the world.
The question is what kind of trade Africa accepts.
International food-safety principles recognise the importance of informing importing countries when consignments have been rejected elsewhere and explaining the reasons for rejection. That principle is particularly important when rejected products are subsequently offered to another market.
A product rejected because it is unsafe should not simply receive a new destination.
Changing the destination does not make a dangerous product safe.
If a consignment is rejected because of contamination, adulteration, dangerous levels of chemicals, misleading labelling or another serious health concern, the importing country should know. African regulators should have access to the information necessary to make an informed decision.
There should be no regulatory arbitrage in which commercial operators search for jurisdictions where scrutiny is weakest.
Africa’s expanding consumer market must not become an alternative disposal mechanism for products that have failed to satisfy safety requirements elsewhere. Food safety should fall under a single, accountable umbrella organisation rather than multiple bodies within the same system. Tacit acceptance of corruption endangers food safety.
This requires stronger national regulatory bodies and cooperation among African customs authorities, standards agencies, food-safety regulators and consumer-protection institutions. A dangerous consignment discovered in one country should not simply cross a neighbouring border and reappear under another label.
The African Continental Free Trade Area should therefore be understood not merely as an instrument for moving more goods across African borders, but also as an opportunity to strengthen common standards, regulatory cooperation and information-sharing.
Unsafe food is not cheap food
Food safety is sometimes presented as an obstacle to affordability.
That is a false economy.
Cheap food that causes illness is not genuinely cheap. The cost is transferred from the seller to the consumer, the health system and the wider economy.
The World Bank estimates that unsafe food costs low- and middle-income economies approximately US$110 billion annually in lost productivity and medical expenses. It identifies sub-Saharan Africa as one of the regions carrying particularly high burdens of foodborne disease. (worldbank.org)
Behind those numbers are human beings: children who become ill, families that incur medical expenses, workers who lose income and health systems that carry additional burdens.
Food safety must therefore be treated as a development issue, not merely as a technical matter for laboratories and inspectors.
African countries need stronger systems for testing imported food, tracing products through supply chains, identifying rejected consignments and rapidly alerting other countries when dangerous products are discovered.
Food security without food safety is an incomplete concept, and I hope African authorities understand and appreciate this.
There is little value in ensuring that food is available if people cannot be confident that the food they consume is safe.
A counterfeit medicine can kill
The issue becomes even more serious with pharmaceuticals.
A counterfeit watch may stop working.
A counterfeit medicine may stop a person from living.
The World Health Organization estimates that at least one in ten medicines in low- and middle-income countries is substandard or falsified, and puts the global economic cost at around US$30.5 billion annually. (who.int)
These products may contain the wrong ingredients, incorrect quantities of active ingredients, contaminants or no effective active ingredient at all.
The consequences extend beyond individual patients. A falsified or substandard antibiotic can contribute to treatment failure and antimicrobial resistance. A counterfeit antimalarial can leave a patient untreated. A medicine that contains the wrong substance can turn a treatable condition into a fatal one.
This is not an abstract concern for Africa.
In December 2025, WHO issued an alert concerning falsified SIMULECT, an injectable immunosuppressant, after falsified products were detected in Rwanda, Bulgaria and Türkiye. Testing of the falsified product found no active pharmaceutical ingredient; it contained ascorbic acid instead. WHO warned that its use could result in therapeutic failure and potentially life-threatening consequences. (who.int)
The lesson is obvious: even sophisticated medicines can be falsified and enter seemingly legitimate supply chains.
This is why medicines cannot be treated simply as commercial commodities.
They are instruments of life.
Africa’s medicines regulators therefore need stronger laboratories, post-market surveillance, cross-border information-sharing, supply-chain traceability and coordinated enforcement.
There is encouraging institutional progress. In May 2026, WHO and the African Medicines Agency launched a framework aimed at strengthening regulatory harmonisation, surveillance and cooperation across Africa. WHO described fragmented regulatory systems, limited market surveillance and complex supply chains as continuing challenges. (who.int)
But institutions alone will not solve the problem.
They require resources, political support and, most of all, integrity.
Counterfeit alcohol is not a harmless business
The same principle applies to alcoholic beverages. Rwanda deserves congratulations for taking the lead in this field. The rest of Africa, starting with Nigeria, must follow suit.
There is nothing inherently illegitimate about local production or informal trade. The danger lies in counterfeit and adulterated products whose contents are unknown, whose alcohol concentrations may be misrepresented and whose production may involve dangerous substances. Protecting African people means protecting the future.
WHO estimates that about a quarter of global alcohol consumption is unrecorded and warns that unrecorded alcohol can involve irregular labelling, unknown alcohol strength and potentially toxic compounds. (who.int)
Counterfeit production can include refilling legitimate bottles, watering down alcohol and, in particularly dangerous cases, replacing ethanol with cheaper toxic substances such as methanol. (iris.who.int)
The consequences can be catastrophic.
This is therefore not simply a matter for customs officers or tax authorities. It is a public-health issue and, where organised criminal networks are involved, a law-enforcement issue.
But who allows these products in?
Here we must confront a subject that is sometimes treated too delicately: corruption within regulatory systems.
It is not enough to blame foreign manufacturers, exporters, smugglers or criminal networks.
There are circumstances in which dangerous products enter markets because somebody inside the system permits them to enter.
A customs official deliberately looks the other way.
A regulator approves a product without the required inspection.
An official accepts a bribe to overlook expired food or falsified documentation.
A government employee facilitates the importation of substandard medicines because a private payment matters more to them than the health of citizens.
These are not minor administrative violations, nor are they the only forms such misconduct can take.
They are betrayals of public trust.
The official entrusted with protecting consumers has a higher duty than the trader seeking profit. When that official sells regulatory authority for personal gain, the consequences may be measured not merely in lost revenue but in hospital admissions, chronic illness and deaths.
Such conduct must therefore attract serious consequences.
African governments should establish and enforce meaningful criminal, administrative and financial penalties for officials who knowingly facilitate the entry or distribution of dangerous products. Regulatory decisions should be auditable. Licensing, inspection and customs-clearance procedures should leave verifiable records. Conflicts of interest should be declared and managed. Whistle-blowers who expose attempts to compromise regulatory decisions should be protected.
And enforcement cannot stop with the junior official who accepted the envelope.
Where corruption is organised, responsibility should be traced through the chain of command.
The regulator who sells public safety for personal enrichment is not protecting the public interest. That regulator is participating in the abuse.
Corporate responsibility cannot be outsourced
Corruption in Africa must never become an excuse for irresponsible international business practices.
A manufacturer, exporter or distributor that knowingly sends unsafe products into a market because it expects weaker enforcement cannot wash its hands of responsibility by pointing to the corrupt official who facilitated the transaction.
Both sides of the transaction may bear responsibility.
The international trader who knowingly exploits regulatory weakness and the public official who knowingly facilitates that exploitation are partners in undermining consumer protection.
Africa must therefore demand accountability from its own institutions while simultaneously demanding responsible conduct from international companies and trading networks.
A multinational company should not apply one conception of consumer safety in a wealthy market and another in a poorer one simply because enforcement differs.
Africa does not ask for special treatment.
It asks for equal respect for human life.
Africa needs regulatory sovereignty
The ultimate objective should not be protectionism.
It should be regulatory sovereignty.
African countries must possess the capacity to determine what enters their markets, establish scientifically defensible standards, test products, trace supply chains and remove dangerous products rapidly.
That requires investment in laboratories, customs systems, digital traceability, standards agencies, medicines regulators and consumer-protection institutions.
It also requires political independence for regulators.
A regulatory authority cannot protect the public effectively if its decisions can be informally overturned by political connections, commercial interests or financial inducements.
There is also an important economic dimension.
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Africa should manufacture more of its own medicines, process more of its own food and develop stronger regional testing and certification capacity. Local production is not merely an industrial-policy objective. It is also a matter of health security, economic resilience and bargaining power.
The stronger Africa’s productive and regulatory capacities become, the less vulnerable its consumers will be to risks in external supply chains and to unscrupulous traders.
The consumer must come first
Africa is no longer a peripheral market.
With more than a billion people and rapidly expanding consumer demand, the continent represents one of the world’s most important emerging markets.
That market power must be translated into regulatory power.
African governments should tell international producers and traders clearly:
Access to African consumers carries responsibilities.
Governments should tell their own regulators something equally clear:
Public office is not a licence for private enrichment.
The citizen who buys food, medicine or an alcoholic beverage has a right to assume that the state has done its job.
That trust is the foundation of a functioning market.
When that trust is betrayed by a foreign company, the company must be held accountable.
When it is betrayed by an African official accepting a bribe, that official must also be held accountable.
When both occur, both must face the consequences.
Africa should remain open, but not vulnerable
Africa does not need to become a fortress.
It needs to become a confident, demanding and intelligently regulated market.
The continent should welcome trade, investment, technology, medicines and food from the rest of the world. But openness cannot mean surrendering the responsibility to protect African citizens.
The measure of successful trade is not simply the number of containers passing through African ports or the value of imports recorded in customs statistics.
We must ask a more fundamental question:
What is inside those containers–and who is responsible when their contents can harm our people?
Africa’s development cannot be built on the consumption of products that other markets have rejected, the enrichment of unscrupulous traders or the private enrichment of officials entrusted with protecting the public.
Food safety is not a luxury.
Medicine quality is not a technical detail.
Consumer protection is not anti-business.
And regulatory integrity is not optional.
They are components of national sovereignty and human security.
Africa must trade with the world. But it must do so on terms that protect the dignity, health and rights of Africans.
The continent should no longer be the place where unacceptable products become acceptable simply because someone is willing to pay a bribe to let them through.