As protests rage outside its Lagos office and a court battle over enforcement heats up, Nigeria’s food safety watchdog drops data that shifts the entire debate.
Weeks earlier, Drinkabl Media reported on protests in which demonstrators challenged regulators to provide evidence that children were purchasing alcohol in sachets. In response, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) presented findings from a survey it said showed that minors were indeed involved in buying sachet alcohol. The numbers landed like a verdict. At a joint press briefing in Abuja on Tuesday, NAFDAC Director-General Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye cited a national survey showing that 54.3% of minors in Nigeria obtain alcohol on their own. Not from parents. Not from older siblings. By themselves, mostly from roadside kiosks selling drinks in sachets and small PET bottles.
The briefing, held with the National Orientation Agency (NOA), was designed to launch a nationwide sensitisation campaign. But the data it surfaced tells a story far more urgent than any awareness drive.
The 2021 survey, conducted across all six geopolitical zones with 1,788 respondents, maps out exactly how children access alcohol in Nigeria. Nearly half source drinks from retailers selling sachets and small PET bottles. Another 49.9% get alcohol from friends or relatives, 45.9% at social gatherings, and 21.7% from their own parents’ homes. Among those buying for themselves, sachets dominate, cheap, portable, and almost impossible to trace.
“Access to alcohol by children can be limited if pack sizes such as sachets and small volume bottles are not available.” — Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, NAFDAC Director-General
The health implications are severe. NAFDAC warned that adolescent drinking can permanently damage the brain’s hippocampus and prefrontal cortex , the regions governing memory, learning and impulse control. Early alcohol use is also linked to depression, poor academic performance, risky sexual behaviour, and road crashes. And sachet spirits compound the danger: at 40–60% ABV, they are far more potent than beer or wine, consumed by bodies still in development.
A Ban in Battleground
This data arrives at a particularly fraught moment. As Drinkabl has reported extensively, the sachet alcohol ban, which NAFDAC began enforcing on January 22, 2026, has become a full-scale political and regulatory crisis. Labour unions NLC and TUC blockaded NAFDAC’s Lagos headquarters for seven consecutive days. A civil society group marched on Aso Rock demanding Adeyeye’s sack. The Office of the SGF issued a counter-directive to halt enforcement, citing economic disruption.
Yet in a Federal High Court filing on February 23, the Federal Ministry of Health declared it has no authority over NAFDAC’s decisions, and that no further moratorium has been granted.
“This ban is not punitive; it is protective. We cannot continue to sacrifice the wellbeing of Nigerians for economic gain.” — Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye
The enforcement push is also playing out across the region. In Kenya, a NACADA-led raid this week uncovered an illegal ethanol packaging operation hidden between two churches in Trans Nzoia County, a reminder that where regulation falters, illicit supply rushes in.
Peer pressure was cited as the leading driver of underage drinking by 50.5% of respondents in the NAFDAC survey. Social media exposure (36.4%) and the sheer accessibility of alcohol outlets (32.6%) rounded out the top factors, a structural problem that no sensitisation campaign alone can fix.
The question is no longer whether sachet alcohol harms Nigerian children. The data answers that. The question is whether Nigeria’s regulatory system, legally armed, politically embattled, can move fast enough to matter.
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