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West Africa is becoming a new transit point for drugs from South America on their way to European markets, Dulue Mbachu reports from Benin for ISN Security Watch.

By Dulue Mbachu in Cotonou, Benin for ISN Security Watch (27/02/08)

Centuries after ships sailed with slaves from the Gulf of Guinea to South America as part of a triangular trade with Europe, increasingly large numbers of ships are heading in the opposite direction in a reverse triangular trade with another cargo: cocaine destined for Europe.

French and Liberian security officials believe the cargo was destined for Nigeria and would have been a major score for the traffickers had the ship not developed mechanical problems just as it was completing the Atlantic passage. Distress calls by the ship's all-Ghanaian crew were intercepted by the French navy, which then located and took the ship to Liberia, whose flag it was flying.

West Africa becomes a major trans point

With security tight in other global cocaine-trafficking routes, West Africa has become a major transit point for cocaine from South America destined for Europe. Officials of the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) and regional law enforcement authorities are concerned that the traffickers are not only fuelling corruption and social vice, but also threatening regional security.

"We've noticed increased figures of cocaine trafficking in the region," Bagmar Thomas, a senior official of UNODC in West Africa, told ISN Security Watch. "We're seeing patterns where countries that didn't figure before are becoming involved."

From 1998 to 2003, annual cocaine seizures in Africa averaged 0.6 metric tonnes a year, a tiny proportion of global seizures, according to a UNODC document on cocaine trafficking published in October 2007. However, the figures have been rising steadily since then, increasing five-fold by 2006.

Data collected for the first nine months of 2007 indicated a significant jump to a record 5.7 metric tonnes of cocaine seized in the region, with a street value of nearly US$500 million. Out of this figure, 99 percent came from West Africa, comprising seizures in Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde and Benin.

"And this is probably only the tip of the iceberg because the lack of seizure reports from neighboring western African countries does not necessarily mean the absence of trafficking in these countries, but more likely the deficiency of law enforcement capacities," concludes the UNODC report.

For the drug dealers on both sides of the southern Atlantic, West Africa has become a major depot where cocaine is stored until the time is opportune to move it into Europe or even North America. Cocaine originating in Colombia, Bolivia or Peru is often shipped out through Brazil or Venezuela, according to law enforcement information cited by the UN report.

The drugs are either flown in small planes to West Africa and are known to have landed in Guinea Bissau and Mauritania. Larger quantities are put in ships that sail into West African waters where they are met by smaller vessels that receive the drugs and move them inland through porous shores.

Once in West Africa the drugs have to take either one of two routes into Europe. Those landing in places like Cape Verde, Senegal and Mauritania follow traditional hashish smuggling routes, using fast boats to move north of Morocco into Europe. Other traffickers use couriers who ingest or conceal the drugs in their luggage, using commercial flights to take them into Europe.

The use of commercial flights for trafficking is identified by the UNODC report as the mainstay of Nigerian drug gangs. Often many drug couriers are put on the same flights as a deliberate tactic to swamp and overwhelm law enforcement officials at the airports.

In one dramatic incident cited in the report, authorities in The Netherlands arrested 32 drug couriers who had landed on the same plane at the Amsterdam airport in December 2006. They had all left Guinea Bissau on a flight that took them through Casablanca, Morocco, and of the number, 28 were Nigerians.

European law enforcement records cited by UNODC show that West Africans account for 90 percent of all Africans arrested for drug trafficking. The largest percentage (44 percent) were Nigerian passport-holders, followed by those from Cape Verde (25 percent) and Ghanaians (8 percent).

Crackdown in Nigeria

Since the mid-1980s Nigeria has been a noted transit center for cocaine from South America and heroine from Asia. The situation prompted not only diplomatic pressure from western countries to crack down on the illicit trade, but culminated in the stationing of US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operatives in Nigeria to carry out joint operations with their local counterparts.

The crackdown in Nigeria forced many local drug gangs to move and set up shop in other West African countries where law enforcement is more lax, according to officials of the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).

Favorite destinations for some of the Nigerian gangs include Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Guinea and Senegal, said confessed traffickers interviewed during official investigations in London, Lagos (Nigeria) and Cotonou (Benin).

In Cotonou, a Nigerian who gave his name as Goddy, said he first began trafficking in heroin as a student in India in the late 1980s. In late 1999, after his return to Nigeria, he traveled to Brazil and Venezuela and made contacts with South American drug dealers who began shipping the drugs to him in Nigeria.

"I had to move to Cotonou a few years ago with increasing pressure being mounted by the NDLEA and the US agents on our business," Goddy told ISN Security Watch.

Those who moved with him include a team of associates specializing in crushing cocaine bars and tying them into little balls that can be swallowed by couriers or in the concealment of drugs in false bottoms of bags, shoes and any articles that could provide concealment, Goddy said.

"It is not easy for the drug traffickers to go through Nigerian airports anymore, that's why they're going to other countries," NDLEA spokesman Mitchell Ofoyeju told ISN Security Watch. "But they have enormous resources at their disposal, and once you discover one tactic they adopt another."

In poor countries such as Guinea Bissau, not only are law enforcement resources lacking, but law enforcement officials are easily corrupted and bought off by drug gangs.

When an aircraft carrying cocaine was seized after it landed at a military air strip in Guinea Bissau last year, the arrested dealers were able to bribe officials and escape before they could be brought to trial.

Security concerns

In Nigeria, security experts fear the drug trade is coalescing with the arms trade, worsening an already volatile situation in the Niger Delta, where violent unrest has evolved into insurgency.

The delta's porous estuaries have carried not only smuggled guns but also smuggled narcotics, security sources say. Inevitably, some of the proceeds from the drugs trade are being used to buy guns, and similarly, funds from gun-running are also making their way into the drugs business, amid signs that some of the armed gangs kidnapping for ransom are motivated by drug habits.

"We are certainly faced with a major drug problem in this city [Port Harcourt]," Abel Wiltshire, a security consultant for oil companies in Nigeria told ISN Security Watch. Port Harcourt, the country's main oil industry center, has experienced some of the worst violence in the Niger Delta.

Several reasons account for West Africa's growing role in cocaine trafficking, according to Denis Destrebecq, who prepared the UNODC report. One is the growing successes against traffickers by law enforcement agencies in the Caribbean and Europe, especially in Spain, where seizures in 2005 were 45 percent of the total in Europe.

Another reason is the advantageous location of West Africa in relation to Europe and South America, with relatively short distances between West Africa and South America.

"Finally, Western African countries are perceived as having a permissive working environment for drug traffickers due to widespread corruption and poor law enforcement structure," Destrebecq said in the UN report told ISN Security Watch.

"Many countries in the region face difficulties in controlling their territory and administering justice, and are plagued by corruption.

ISN Security Watch - The West Africa-South America drug route

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