By Tanu Jalloh
The drugs regulator in Sierra Leone slams the trend. Cocaine trade is lucrative. It can’t be stopped easily. Claims are that people in and close to government have a hand in the deal. They benefit from the current state of affairs.
The executive director at the national drug law enforcement agency, NDLEA,thinks the drugs trade is unabated. Those who run it are powerful. Rtd. Lieutenant Colonel Sim Turay is certain and specific in his charges. He says the trafficking of cocaine is on the increase; probably ever increasing since the botched 2008 Lungi landing.
He is not a happy man. His organisation too, is not. Unlike other government agencies, which are an extension of the president’s office, the national drug law enforcer feels his is the least supported. The least budgeted for, by the present government. The neglect is deliberate, he claims. And he blames it on the say-so of some powerful people who benefit from the cocaine business.
Is he resorting to blackmail, desperate to see an increase in his budget? Is he genuinely worried? Either way he makes a point. In his office on Walpole Street in central part of town, the director begins to reach for some papers on his desk as if to prove a point. He stops and raises his head again and clears his throat. His voice turns a bit croaky. He clears his throat again and says: “If I am tempted to name names it will be a tsunami in this country”.
Although an aggrieved source, he seems, SimTuray’s latest outburst confirms several other proofs. For example, in 2008, more than 700 kilograms of cocaine worth over US$30 million along with arms and ammunition were discovered in a small aircraft in-bound from South America. The whole story would later become the “Lungi Affair”.
That single episode remains the biggest recent reference to the seriousness or lack of political will to curb the drugs trade. Summer Walker’s desk study in 2013 fears that if the country’s reputation as a hub for illegal diamond mining has somewhat faded, the Lungi Affair and growing reports of drug trafficking in the broader West Africa region indubitably renewed interest in the country’s criminal landscape. Drugs and crime are intertwined. Both are bad for society, yet are ‘good’ for business.
In his landmark ruling, Justice Nicholas Browne-Marke, who presided over the Lungi Affair trial, publicly denounced the intimate nexus that had emerged between criminal and political figures in Sierra Leone at the time, suggesting that drug traffickers had “compromised key state agencies, as well as senior government officials.” His observation, with no strings attached.
Invariably, the judge’s concerns share some commonality with those of the NDLEA boss. That Sierra Leone is one of the key distribution or transit zones along the West African coast for South American trafficking organizations, establishing safe havens for receipt, storage and transshipment of large consignment of cocaine destined for European markets. Even so, he is not being too unnecessarily exaggerative in his assessment of the cocaine trade in the country.
Concerning drugs and crime, the country has been identified as one of the major gateways in West Africa for cocaine trafficking, says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.“West Africa is changing more and more from being just a stockpiling place into a hub where cocaine is traded,” says Antonio Mazzitelli, its regional rep. A 2011 UN report maintains that despite the robust international presence in the country, Sierra Leone remains vulnerable to drug trafficking and organized crime, highlighting that “an increase in economic activities generated by extractive industries could render the threat of illicit drug trafficking even more insurmountable.”
In 2013 Walker finds out that “indeed more recent developments regarding questionable arms deals and the links between criminal actors and the extractive industry suggest the potential for political and business elites to fall back on old practices as a means to achieve their goals”. This, points to the perception that the business and political class thing is real and visible - power, money and the alleged state backing.
Some observers have gauged the extent of collusion between politician and businessmen using such parameters as weak mining and large scale land use contracts being signed off to multinationals. Incredible tax concessions and unaccountable revenue generating mechanisms. Unobtrusive duty free waivers give such businesses a field day to bring in and clear containers of consignment the specifics of which are kept secret. The drug law enforcement agency believes that that creates room for cocaine coming into the country unchecked.
“There are people in high places who are trading in drugs and are likely those who are going all out to prevent our access to resources that will enable our operation,” the director tells a visiting committee of Members of Parliament on internal affairs in Freetown. He laments the amount of money allocated to fighting the drugs trade. He says “with a paltry Le300 million annual budget [about US$66,000], eleven personnel and no operational capacity” they are bound to fail against a multi-billion dollar trade. Early this year the office of the chief of staff says it is the least performing agency. It failed the performance contract benchmarks.
Although he falls short of naming names of people in ‘high places’, the drugs regulator boss threatens to spill the beans if this “sheer neglect” of the drugs law enforcement agency persists. That leaves the transnational drug control unit, a complementary outfit, with a tougher battle to win. The office of national security, the police, the British and US governments are helping.
But the drugs trade is huge. Like Turay claims, almost uncontrollable. Although the cash value of cocaine being traded in and through Sierra Leone may not be readily available, the African Economic Development Institute’s recent estimates put the value in Guinea-Bissau aroundUS$2 billion a year, almost twice the GDP of that country. Both are among countries comprising the West African hub, according to multiple UN sources.
Again Walker, a freelance researcher and writer for international policy living in Berlin, recently finds out that the extent of public sector corruption in the country is of particular concern, not least because as evidenced in different instances within Sierra Leone and in countries across the region, it can nurture and even encourage and embolden organized crime. “Illicit networks” is his version of Turay’s apparent reference to business people and politicians or people in high places dealing in and or benefiting from the powerful cocaine enterprise.
“In many circumstances links between public sector corruption and organized criminal activity are developed on the back of existing illicit networks. In Sierra Leone, corruption and the use of political position for personal gain stems back to the 1970s and 1980s during the one party rule of President Siaka Stevens, when government officials at all levels colluded regularly with businessmen to profit fromthe distribution of mineral rents. These illicit networks were built on the basis of alliances between members of the political and business elite involved in the mineral resources trade who manipulated the quantity and value of exports and colluded with politicians to evade taxes”.
Indeed prior to the outbreak of the civil war, he recalls,entrenched patronage and corruption, linked to illicit criminal activity, led to the stagnation of political processes. The interest of the country’s ruling elite was to appropriate power, market control, and material rewards for themselves to the detriment of the broader citizenry. With the help of their criminal links, the political and economic elite (often indistinguishable from each other), helped create, a ‘shadow state’ in which their authority was based on personalized access to power and goods, he says.
The present government suggests vulnerability. Whilst she was foreign affairs minister in 2009, ZainabHawa Bangura told the UK based online news channel,The Telegraph,that the [drug] cartels had not corrupted the government's senior levels. “But sooner or later, they will,” she added. “Because they have millions of dollars and you need to be a saint to reject that.” The president, Ernest Bai Koroma, too, is worried but believes they can take on the cartels and their cocaine trade. Thus after the 2008 Lungi affair, the worst kept secret according to one diplomat in Freetown, the government rushed a law to allow the High Court look into what would later become the biggest such narco trial in the history of West Africa.
(C) Politico 29/06/14
