NAFDAC Listed vs Registered: Why Your Herbal Product Isn't in the Greenbook

Registration is the full approval pathway, and it is what conventional medicines go through. The applicant submits the product's formulation, manufacturing details, stability data, and evidence of safety and efficacy. NAFDAC evaluates the dossier, inspects the manufacturing site, tests samples in its laboratories, and — if everything passes — issues a registration number valid for five years, renewable.

A registered product has been assessed for whether it does what it claims and whether it is safe at the stated dose. That is a high bar and an expensive one. It is why a registered paracetamol tablet can print a specific strength on the box and a specific indication in the leaflet.

Registered drug products appear in the NAFDAC Greenbook, the agency's public database of registered products. That is the database this site's checker searches, and it is the database almost every online "NAFDAC verification" tool searches, because it is the one NAFDAC publishes.

Listing is a lighter pathway, created for herbal and traditional medicines, dietary supplements and similar products. NAFDAC calls these "herbal medicinal products and dietary supplements". The applicant still has to satisfy the agency on identity, labelling, manufacturing hygiene and basic safety, and the product still has to be made in a facility NAFDAC has inspected. But listing does not require the clinical efficacy evidence that registration demands.

The practical consequence is written on the box. A listed product is not permitted to claim it treats, cures or prevents a disease. This is why the labelling on herbal products reads the way it does — "supports", "aids", "promotes wellness" — rather than naming a condition. When a herbal product's advertising DOES claim to cure malaria, diabetes, hypertension or infertility, that claim is outside what the listing allows, whatever the number on the bottle says.

A listing number is a real NAFDAC number. It means NAFDAC knows about the product and has permitted it onto the market. It does not mean NAFDAC has found evidence that the product works.

The Greenbook is the register of REGISTERED products. Listed products are recorded under the listing scheme, and NAFDAC does not publish that record as a searchable public database in the way it publishes the Greenbook.

The scale of the gap is easy to underestimate. Our copy of the Greenbook holds 11,698 records. Of those, only 150 are classified as herbals and nutraceuticals, and they are overwhelmingly multivitamins and tonics from conventional pharmaceutical companies — Vita Ace, Zuplex-B, Super Apeti Plus — rather than the herbal remedies sold in Nigerian markets. Fewer than 20 records in the entire Greenbook carry the L suffix.

So if you search the Greenbook for a bitters brand, a herbal capsule or a wellness tea, you will almost certainly find nothing — not because the product is unregistered, but because that whole category of product lives somewhere the Greenbook does not reach. The same is true of our checker, which is a copy of the Greenbook and inherits its boundaries exactly.

NAFDAC regulates far more than medicines. Bottled and sachet water, biscuits, powdered milk, seasoning, cosmetics, soaps, insecticides and medical devices all carry NAFDAC numbers, and each category has its own registration series.

Those products are also absent from the Greenbook, for the same reason: the Greenbook is the drug register. Searching it for a table-water brand, a skin cream or a snack food will return nothing, and that result carries no information at all about whether the product is genuine.

The practical rule is simple. A verification tool can only tell you about the register it holds. Before you treat "not found" as bad news, ask which register was searched and whether your product would have been in it in the first place.

Start with the shape of the number. A NAFDAC listing number follows the same pattern as a registration number — a short letter-and-digit prefix, a hyphen, then four to six digits — with a letter appended at the end. A7-1234L is plausible. A twelve or thirteen digit number with no letters at all is the barcode, which every product in the world carries and which tells you nothing about Nigerian approval.

Next, read the label against the claim. A listed product that advertises itself as curing a named disease is making a claim its listing does not cover. That mismatch is the single most useful signal available to a buyer, and it needs no database at all.

Then go to NAFDAC directly. The agency's contact channels and its e-services portal at nafdac.gov.ng can confirm a listing that the Greenbook cannot, and NAFDAC publishes public alerts naming specific products it has found to be substandard, falsified or falsely claiming approval. Those alerts are worth searching for by product name before you buy.

Finally, be sceptical of any online tool — including this one — that answers "this product is not registered" for a herbal product. No public database supports that conclusion. The honest answer is "this product is not in the register I searched", and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between information and a guess.

A no-match in the Greenbook means one thing only: no registered drug product carries that number or that name in the copy of the register that was searched. It is a statement about the register, not a verdict on what is in your hand.

There are at least five ordinary reasons a genuine product returns nothing. It may be a listed product rather than a registered one. It may be a food, cosmetic, water or device product in a different NAFDAC series. It may have been registered recently, after the copy of the register being searched was taken. Its registration may have lapsed and be under renewal. Or the number may simply have been mistyped — an O read as a zero, an I as a 1, which happens constantly with numbers printed in small type on curved packaging.

None of that makes a no-match worthless. If you searched a registration number that SHOULD be in the Greenbook — a conventional medicine with a standard A4 or B4 or 04 prefix — and it returns nothing, that is a genuine warning worth acting on. The signal is real; it just has a narrower scope than most people assume.