- A good idea but the acid test is rigorous planning and flawless implementation
That Brig-Gen. Buba Marwa (rtd), new chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), is making early moves to checkmate drug misuse, especially among critical segments of the populace, is a thing of cheer.
Not so, the default resistance from some of the target audience, who already try to pooh-pooh the idea, without understanding — or even bothering to understand — the full details; preferring to burn their energy on ill motives and conspiracy theories. That is the bane of contemporary Nigeria.
Meeting NDLEA commanders in 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Gen. Marwa said his agency would seek the government’s approval to conduct (random) drug tests on security personnel, newly appointed government employees and students of tertiary institutions, according to a news report by The Punch.
But in the same story, Sunday Asefon, President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), was already exempting the student body: “If NDLEA is going to do any test, I know our students across all our institutions in the country are very good,” the story quoted him to have said. “NDLEA should face Nigerian Police and truck drivers.”
How informed the NANS president’s stand is, is open to question, given the harsh reality of cultism on tertiary campuses; and the role drug misuse plays in driving it.
A university teacher, Prof. Bamikole Fagbohungbe, quoted as head of department of Psychology at the University of Lagos (UNILAG), dismissed, offhand, the Marwa initiative: “If they conduct the test, what is the end result? They should stop wasting the resources of this country on such things.”
Though the good professor has eminent right to his opinion, and we are not privy to the quality of the question he answered, it would appear hardly professorial to just dismiss an initiative yet to be tried, and start alleging ill motives.
Now, spot interviews with two persons hardly equate a scientific and structured feedback, from the academic community, as rejecting or embracing the new NDLEA drug test proposals. But it shows straightaway barriers such initiatives might encounter, particularly in areas of breaches of privacy, putative stigma, and even likely corruption: both of the process, and in putative waste of scarce funds, on hardly justified operations, as the UNILAG professor pointed out.
Still, all these fears hardly vitiate the need for the new NDLEA thinking, since drug is economic sabotage (drug trafficking), public health crisis (citizen misuse, including by security agents, leading to killing and maiming of innocent citizens), and crime and criminality-enabler (as clear from banditry, kidnapping, terrorism — violent crimes Nigeria is presently grappling with).
In view of all these, therefore, the Marwa suggestion is clearly following the good old credo: prevention is better than cure. It ought to be given a try.
But having made a case for the idea, NDLEA must come out with rigorous and scientific processes that would make the intervention credible and transparent. Aside from seeking basic government approval, and possibly working at a legislation to formalise the new thinking, it must launch a pre-implementation enlightenment blitz, among its target audience.
The programme would fail outright if it doesn’t persuade Mr. NANS President and confederates, that the initiative is not to demonise the student population, as a den of drug abusers but a healthy ploy to make tertiary campuses safer from cultism and freer from violent crimes; partner with appropriate dons, polytechnic teachers and colleges of education lecturers, to develop rigorous capacity for introducing and implementing the random tests; and, of course, convince co-security agencies that NDLEA is not, by this initiative, promoting itself a swaggering czar over and above others; but from the drug tests, only honing the agencies for better public services.
All of these should precede, and form the basis for, any proposed legislation on the matter, such that by implementation stage, students and their unions would have been convinced the new thinking is for the mental health of all, and therefore a boost to their academic communities. The same goes for the security agencies and new civil service recruits.
But beyond ingraining the new ethos, operational care must be taken to ensure implementation does not peter down to the chaos that the National Identification Number (NIN) registration, and linkage to phone numbers, is experiencing right now. Only rigorous planning can avoid that.
