Drug Markets and Pharmaceutical Reform: Thirty Years after IMF Structural Adjustment in Postcolonial Nigeria

This presentation examines the effects of 1980s International Monetary Fund's (IMF) structural adjustment policies (SAP) on the Nigerian pharmaceutical market. It discusses the contradictory rationalizations of adjustment where proponents argued that the growing Third World debt crisis could be alleviated by privatizing governments, devaluing currencies, removing subsidies, and other measures, which were imagined as offsetting the global balance of payments. Yet, such restructuring has led to the concentration of proprietary markets in Europe and North America while eliminating global drug manufacturing and extended markets in Nigeria and indeed Africa. In the wake of Thatcher and Reagan neoliberal ideologies, SAP promised market freedom over and above “wasteful” state bureaucracies, yet the real outcome has been that private markets in Africa declined as quickly as freedom was promised. In Nigeria, this was especially acute: there were 120 companies manufacturing and distributing drugs, two-thirds of which went bankrupt almost immediately following SAP implementation. Marketing practices were drastically reformed within Nigeria and worldwide where a complicated set up strategies now serve as protectionist measures for especially European and North American drug markets; how West African markets function are key to these designs. Drawing on oral histories of drug manufacturing in Nigeria, representing both Nigerian and company perspectives, the paper analyzes the relationship between neoliberal reform, Cold War politics, and the consolidation of the drug industry over the last thirty years.