Nigeria has one of the highest hepatitis B carrier rates in the world — roughly 11–14% of adults are HBsAg-positive, against a global average of about 4%. In 1982, when the first plasma-derived hepatitis B vaccine reached the international market, Nigeria had a working vaccine laboratory at Yaba (producing yellow-fever vaccine since the 1940s), a virology department at UI capable of HBsAg isolation, and a Federal Ministry of Health budget line for vaccine self-sufficiency.
A staged programme was drafted to plasma-fractionate HBsAg from screened Nigerian donor blood, alum-adjuvant the antigen, and fill-finish at Yaba. The cost of the imported fractionation and filling lines was approved in naira-denominated 1984 budgets.
Between 1986 and 1988 the Structural Adjustment Programme devalued the naira from roughly 0.9/USD to 4/USD and then to 8/USD. The imported equipment line, denominated in dollars at the supplier, became unaffordable. The capital budget was first carried over, then reabsorbed; the trained staff were dispersed.
Nigeria today imports every dose of hepatitis B vaccine in its EPI schedule. The technology has since moved from plasma-derived to recombinant — produced in Belgium, India, Cuba and South Korea. The Yaba site is part of the Biovaccines Nigeria Limited public-private joint venture announced in 2017; commercial production has not begun.
This is the catalogue's clearest example of the second failure mode — not absence of science, but absence of foreign-exchange stability long enough to import a capital good once.