With what Marwa and his men have achieved so far within their short time in office, they deserve improved institutional capacity building and financial support from government and Nigeria’s global partners.
In turning the heat on drug barons in Nigeria, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) made a massive seizure of cocaine worth $278.2 million in Lagos a couple of days ago. It is said to be the biggest haul in the country’s history and that of Africa. The successful operation signals a new vista in the country’s quest for tackling drug trafficking and its deleterious consequences on human health, national security and the economy.
Details of the seizure showed that four barons, a Jamaican and a manager of the warehouse where the illicit substances were kept, have been arrested from their hotels and hideouts in a well coordinated and intelligence-driven operation. The cartel had been trailed since 2018. The crack cocaine, stored in 10 travel bags and 13 drums, reportedly has a street value of N194 billion. The NDLEA Director of Media and Advocacy, Femi Babafemi said the class ‘A’ drug was warehoused in an Ikorodu residential estate, from where the cartel was trying to sell it to buyers in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world. The involved suspects, who are now in NDLEA custody, are Messrs Soji Jibril, Emmanuel Chukwu, Wasiu Akinade, Sunday Ogunteleru, Kevin Smith and the Jamaican referred to.
The Chairman of NDLEA, Buba Marwa, elatedly warned traffickers to be conscious of the fact that the game has changed. Indeed, that has been the narrative since he assumed office in January 2021. President Muhammadu Buhari, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, was no less ecstatic. “Please keep it up,” he implored Marwa. It is cheery that the NDLEA achieved the feat in collaboration with the America Drug Enforcement Administration (ADEA), underscoring the transnational collaboration required in dealing with the menace of drugs.
Marwa, at the helm of affairs in NDLEA, is case study in service delivery: that at all times, the country should do away with the culture of having square pegs in round holes in public office appointments. The recent cocaine crime bust is a reminder of the scale of the Emmanuel Nwude Brazil bank fraud, which involved $242 million, for which the EFCC under its pioneer Chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, masterminded Nwude’s trial and conviction for a 25-year jail term in 2005.
The NDLEA, set up in 1989 for “exterminating illicit drug trafficking and consumption in the Nigerian society,” has been unrelenting in giving effect to this objective since Marwa rewired its DNA on his appointment. On 27 January 2021, in the month he assumed office, illicit drugs (cocaine and heroin) valued at N21 billion and weighing 28.50 kilogrammes were seized and destroyed. This was followed by another seizure of 8.40 kilogrammes of cocaine worth N7 billion. Incredibly, within the first quarter of that year, illicit drugs worth N60 billion were confiscated and destroyed.
NDLEA’s dragnets spread across the country are evident in more than 18,940 arrests that have been made; 600 frozen bank accounts; 1,111 convictions in the first 11 months of Marwa’s tenure; and the mopping up of 3.3 million kilogrammes of assorted drugs, which include the 554 cartons of Tramadol that would have been in the hands of terrorists, bandits and youths. Also, about 249 luxury cars and 37 mansions have been seized, while the agency secured the final forfeiture of N619.1 million, out of N871.5 million sequestered from different individuals. At our airports, couriers are routinely being arrested, who detail how they are working for barons in Brazil and other jurisdictions.
The global menace of the circulation and distribution of drugs is really more than what many Nigerians can easily comprehend. Sadly, the country had for long been on international focus as a major cocaine and heroin transit hub for European, Asian and North American markets by the United Nations Office for Drug and Crime (UNODC). This was why the European Union funded a project, “Response to Drugs and Related Organised Crime in Nigeria”, from January 2013 to May 2017, which UNODC supervised, “in its efforts to fight illicit drug production, trafficking and use, and to curb related organised crime, including counterfeit narcotics and psychotropic substances.”
Locally, a National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2018, which involved 38,850 households spanning the 36 states of the federation and Abuja, revealed that 9,344 of these households comprised “problem drug users.” With kidnappers and bandits now demanding part of their ransom in drugs, a new survey is most likely to unfurl a staggering scenario. As a most lucrative business for criminals that straddles cultivation, manufacturing, trafficking or distribution and sale, its effective destruction must embrace a root-and-branch strategy. States, local governments, faith-based groups and non-profit organisations should join the redemptive cohort by organising awareness campaigns on the dangers of illicit drugs to health and the society. Certainly, the NDLEA cannot do the job alone.
Death is the uncompromising penalty for drug trafficking in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and China, Saudi Arabia where 100s of our youths have fallen victims. A total of 73 of them were on death row in Malaysia alone as of August 2019. Yet, our youths who may not be aware of the consequences of being involved are often caught in the evil web.
To win the war, serious focus should be on law enforcement personnel in the Police and Nigeria Immigration; the judiciary and prison authorities, going by emerging trends. For instance, a suspended Deputy Commissioner of Police, Abba Kyari, who was also the Head of the Inspector-General of Police Intelligence Response Squad, is standing trial with four other police officers for an alleged collusion with drug traffickers: Chibunna Umeibe and Emeka Ezenwane, who were sentenced to six years in prison in June by a Federal High Court, Abuja, presided over by Justice Emeka Nwite.
More inscrutable is the collusion among prison officials, lawyers and convicted drug barons that resulted in 197 of them evading jail terms between 2005 and 2006 during President Obasanjo’s administration. A Federal Government investigative panel set up by the then Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Bayo Ojo, chaired by retired Justice Gilbert Obayan, discovered that “All the cases in this jail racketeering were handled by the same set of counsel and prosecutors. Similarly, another 101 drug convicts for the year 2005 were never brought to the prison, bringing the total of convicts evading jail to 197, within the period.”
The report of this panel was not acted on till date, thereby suggesting the dreadful might of drug barons. The panel even recommended that the 14 lawyers involved in this most embarrassing nefarious act should be disrobed. PREMIUM TIMES calls for the report to be dusted off for appropriate sanctions to be meted out to the culprits, as there is no statute limitation involved in the matter. This is one way through which this evil can be uprooted in Nigeria. As a well known transit hub for drugs in the region, how $278 million worth of illicit drugs passed through our airports into warehouses in Lagos deserves a serious inquest. All the accomplices at the airport must be fished out and punished in accordance with the laws of the land.
In Mexico, Colombia and Italy, drug mafias have demonstrated how powerful and dangerous they could be in hijacking political processes and the judiciary. The barons here too can exercise such powers as fraudsters or 419ners did in 1999 when some of them found their way into the two chambers of the National Assembly. Nigeria should not yield more territory to these nefarious actors. With what Marwa and his men have achieved so far within their short time in office, they deserve improved institutional capacity building and financial support from government and Nigeria’s global partners, in order for NDLEA to sustain its present momentum.