The Chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Ahmadu Giade, unwittingly exhumed the case of 197 convicted drug barons that evaded jail terms in Lagos when the agency destroyed hard drugs valued at N3.5 billion in Badagry, Lagos, last month. It is incredible that prison warders and other officials of the state conspired with these felons without consequences, in a country that lays claim to the rule of law.
Even more unnerving is the fact that the matter was swept under the carpet, despite the report of a Federal Government panel that confirmed it. An earlier re-arrest of one of the convicts with drugs at the Aminu Kano International Airport, by the NDLEA, triggered the alarm bell. At the behest of the then President Olusegun Obasanjo, his Attorney General, Bayo Ojo, set up a panel chaired by retired Justice Gibert Obayan to investigate this internal security scandal.
The panel’s findings read in part: “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, which was submitted to the Federal Government in February 2007, four months to the end of Obasanjo’s Presidency, and scooped on April 18, 2009 by this newspaper, listed 14 lawyers and 11 prosecutors and their service numbers, involved in this infamy. Unfortunately, these depraved officers of the law also escaped the long arm of the law, as did the convicts. It is only in banana republics that such bizarre conduct is inexorably intertwined with governance.
But has such odd drama been purged from our justice delivery system? We doubt very much. Our belief stems from the obvious fact that the Nigerian society of today is far worse off than it was 10 years ago. Most state institutions have broken down. Increasingly, our youths get too involved in life on the fast lane to the point that they dare countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, China and Saudi Arabia, where death is the uncompromising penalty for drug trafficking.
Although the NDLEA has been stopping some of these traffickers in their tracks with its frequent seizures of cocaine and heroin at the country’s airports and public destruction of these substances, including cannabis, otherwise known as Indian hemp, what is most critical is ensuring that traffickers nabbed or convicted serve their punishment as our penal code dictates.
Doing it well in this regard transcends the prefecture of the NDLEA. We insist that the 11 prosecutors and 14 lawyers with clear identities, who aided the perversion of the course of justice in the 197 drug fugitives case, be brought to book. This is the only way to sustain concerted efforts from within and outside the country against the drug scourge; and guarantee the integrity of our justice delivery system.
Our foreign partners in this struggle such as the United Nations Office on Drug and Narcotics, the United States and those in the European Union should be interested in this matter and demand action. Criminal actions are not statute-barred in Nigeria, as they are in other climes. The arrest of seven officials of FIFA last week by the US law enforcement officers for their alleged involvement in a $10 million financial scam and other allegations of bribery that stretched back 24 years illustrates this point.
Nigeria is already known as a major cocaine and heroin transit hub for European, Asian and North American markets by the UNODC. To deal with this enigma, the EU has begun funding a project – Response to Drugs and Related Organised Crime in Nigeria – which spans January 2013 to May 2017 and is supervised by UNODC. The global body says that the campaign will help the government “in its efforts to fight illicit drug production, trafficking and use, and to curb related organised crime, including counterfeit narcotics and psychotropic substances.”
However, drugs are sold openly in some places in Lagos and other cities, a crisis with deleterious social consequences, especially for the youth. In April, four Nigerians were among the eight foreign nationals that Indonesia executed for drug-related offences, defying, as usual, global pleas for clemency. The deceased were part of the 132 Nigerians reportedly on death row abroad. China accounts for 120 of them. Curiously, some of these perverts beat all the security networks at our airports before they landed in these Disneylands of death for drug offences.
These lapses in our anti-drug drive call for periodic reviews of existing mechanisms to make them stronger, especially security at the air, sea ports and land borders; criminal justice delivery system and capacity building. The mistake is often made in seeing the Bench, lawyers and police as the only elements in the justice dispensation chain. But the 197 drug convicts jail evasion saga strongly dictates that prison officials too are critical components of this all important social architecture.
