Crop Substitution: An Unexplored Strategy for Tackling the Scourge of Illicit Drugs in Africa

by Eze Eluchie

The major internationally recognized illicit substance of abuse cultivated in Africa, particularly the West African sub-region, is marijuana. The cultivation, production and trafficking in marijuana is thus, for most Africans, the gateway into the enterprise of illicit drug cultivation and trafficking.

Nationals of countries in the West African sub-region, or more appropriately put, persons holding Traveling Documents of West African countries, constitute a sizable proportion of extremely low-level suspected couriers (‘moles’ – usually involved in ingesting or otherwise physically ferrying minuscule quantities of illicit substances) involved with international trafficking of illicit drugs into Europe and the United States.

It is in cognizance of the foregoing that it is pertinent that global efforts be harnessed to ensure the minimization, and probable eradication, of practices, enterprises and infrastructure that give rise to illicit drug cultivation and trafficking in Africa.

In some areas of the West African sub-region, communities in their entirety have been known to be engaged in the cultivation of the marijuana plant. Some families are wholly dependent on the proceeds of their marijuana farms for their daily subsistence. These families see marijuana cultivation, primarily, as a means of survival.

In some other instances, poor soil potency has rendered it futile to cultivate age-old food crops (such as yams, cassava, beans etc). To compound the problem of these farmers, they lack the resources to 'switch-over' and invest in enhanced species of seedlings of the food crops they are familiar with. Such small scale farmers/farm communities are easy prey to 'barons' in the business of illicit drug trafficking, who quickly introduce the hapless farmers to the marijuana crop, with promises of seemingly incredulous profit margins. Some of these rural farmers, usually unschooled and illiterate, are, at the outset, oblivious to the criminal nature of their new vocation.

In Nigeria, for instance, there have been instances of whole extended families (comprised of fathers, wives, uncles, auntie's and children, some as young as 7years old) being apprehended and paraded (by our law enforcement/anti-narcotic agencies) as criminal producers of illicit substances – particularly marijuana. The irony is usually that such rural farm families do not make any effort to flee from the arresting officers. These rural farming-families have nowhere else to run to - they are stuck to their farms for life.

In the above described scenario, which is the norm, well articulated crop substitution programs will obviously achieve more positive results than merely punishing hapless people who are only interested in surviving.

When it is realized that over 95% of suspects detained by federal anti-narcotic agents in Nigeria are persons involved, in one way or the other, with marijuana cultivation, possession or distribution, the exigency of instituting a credible and effective crop substitution regime to tackle the problem of illicit marijuana cultivation becomes more apparent.

The African Center for Health Law and Development (ACHLD) through one of its constituting organizations, People Against Drug Dependence & Ignorance (PADDI) has been involved in a series of advocacy initiatives geared towards ensuring that palliative measures consisting of Crop Substitution, backed by necessary financial (or in-kind) support is extended to indigent farmers engaged in the cultivation of marijuana. ACHLD-PADDI had an opportunity to raise the issue of the absence of crop substitution programs for illicit drug producers in the course of the release of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) Annual Report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Lagos, Nigeria.

At the occasion, which had in attendance Dr. Phillip Emafo, a Nigerian and former Chair of the INCB, the Chairman of the Nigerian National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) and the UNODC Country Representative for Nigeria in attendance, it was worrying to realize that no plausible reasons were presented for the failure of the international community to explore and apply crop substitution techniques as a strategy to curtail illicit production of drugs in Africa.
 

The suggested initiatives is predicated on the fact that farmers who engage in illicit cultivation of marijuana purely as a means of survival, deserve an opportunity to cultivate alternative crop, prior to the hammer of prosecution and incarceration being wielded on such indigent farmers.

The idea, Crop Substitution, is admittedly not novel. Crop Substitution is a recognized and successful strategy adopted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and a plethora of domestic authorities/governments to curtail the production of coca (cocaine) and opium (heroin) in such diverse countries as Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Most unfortunately, and for as yet inexplicable reasons, the UNODC and relevant domestic governments have not deemed it fit to adapt Crop Substitution techniques to the African environment as a strategy to combat illicit drug production. 

Is it that the African farmer does not deserve an opportunity to substitute an illicit crop with legitimate produce, which has the potential for offering him/her commensurate, if not higher, pecuniary gains? Does the African farmer not deserve the same treatment as his colleagues in Latin America and Asia where the international community invests heavily to ensure the eradication, or at least minimization, of the acreage under illicit drug cultivation?

The intention of this piece should not be misconstrued as an attempt to create the picture of 'an innocent victim' for all persons involved in the illicit cultivation of marijuana in Africa. Far from it. There is no doubt that there exists out there, in various remote corners of the African continent, thousands of greed-induced persons involved with the illicit cultivation of marijuana. It is our belief and opinion that the full weight of the law should be brought to bear on such characters. 

The concern in advocating for adoption of crop substitution mechanisms as a strategy in tackling illicit drug production in Africa, is borne out of the realization that 'ignorance' and 'abject poverty', a lethal combination anywhere, is much in abundance amongst rural farming communities on the African continent. By moving hastily to penalize illiterate rural farmers engaged in illicit drug production, without adequate sensitization, education and alternatives being proffered, a miscarriage of justice is effected. 

Picture: Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) official at the site of a confisticated illicit Marijuana farm.

The Worst of Nigeria Awards For Year 2018

by Eze Eluchie,

Some have asked: why the Worst of Nigeria Awards?; Why not just stop at acknowledging the goods? Why highlight the bad? The answer is quite obvious: as much as it is important for societal advancement to showcase positives who contributed towards moving society forward, it is also vital to identify the negatives whose existence, actions and or inactions has kept our society in the backwaters we now find ourselves.

Ideally, the Justice sector of a territory will ensure that these negatives are identified and adequately penalized. Where the Justice sector is compromised as in the case of Nigeria and unable to play its role, alternate means of highlighting negatives becomes imperative. Failure of any society to precisely pinpoint these negatives may result in wrong role models being foisted on society with the calamitous implications for society.

In the case of Nigeria, a geographic entity abundantly endowed with natural and human resources, these negatives have cumulatively caused the country to be the poverty capital of the world, a significant drawback to the attainment of continental and global benchmarks in human, economic and developmental sectors and a debilitating burden to its citizens.

The foregoing founds the necessity for the Worst of Nigeria Awards.

Worst Corporate Entity.

There can be no worse brigandage unleashed on residents/citizens of any particular territory than unregulated and unstructured capitalism. The people are left at the whims and caprice of shylocks that are in no way different fro armed hoodlums.

From Financial Services entities which give loans at double-digit rates that can only be serviced if the recipient thereof is involved in illicit drugs and human trafficking businesses or other like high return-on-Investment escapades; loans which lead to the collapse and penury of any legit entrepreneur who dares access the baits they dangle in the name of financial facilities; to contrived conglomerates whose major source of income was, is and will always be surreptitiously and or illicitly obtained ‘Import Duty Waivers’, Tax Concessions and monopolies over essential goods – actions which cumulatively serve to ensure the demise of genuine entrepreneurial spirit amongst the populace. The Nigerian corporate sector is dominated by entities that in saner climes, would have long exchanged designer suits for Government Issued jumpers used in penitentiaries.

One organization stood out in Year 2018 for its added efforts to make life miserable for Nigerians. Having acquired monopolies over an essential service from a most opaque ‘privatization’ process, these entities proceeded to increase tariffs at will without any commensurate improvement in services; resorting often times to the use of publicly-financed armed law enforcement personnel (usually the Police Force) to recover what is basically private corporate ‘debts’.

Despite a keen contest with the Dangote Group, the winner of the Year 2018 Worst Corporate Entity Award are the various Electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOs), which operate under the aegis of the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED).

The Worst State Governor/Agency

Exploring glaring loopholes in the Nigerian Constitution, virtually all the Governors of Nigeria’s 36 States have personalized governance in their respective States, making it imperative to ascribe failures or successes recorded in all agencies of State Government to the person and abilities of the State Governors. Having successfully extinguished what ought to be the 3^rd strata of governance in Nigeria, the Local Government Councils’, these State Governors proceeded to collapse all checks and balances and means of control of executive excesses inbuilt in the Constitution. The State Houses of Assembly, and in some instances even the Judiciary, became mere appendages of the Governor.

With State Governors acquiring the status of demi-gods, using the entire finances of the State as their personal piggy-banks, appointing and sacking whosoever at their pleasure, the reality of a failed State manifests. The above unwholesome situation is one of the root causes of why the Nigerian State is in the sorry state it finds itself whilst the rest of the world keeps on forging ahead.

There certainly were many nominees to choose from for this category of Awards. From the Governor of Kano State, Mr. Abdulahi Ganduje, who was caught on video pocketing hundreds of thousands of US Dollars in slush funds; to the character in Akwa Ibom State, Emanuel Udom, who paid his personal Attorneys’ directly from the State treasury for his personal legal issues; to Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State who had the temerity to tell the world that he had paid monies to foreigners who were killing the citizens of his state to ‘prevent’ a continuation of such killings – likely contenders were aplenty.

The winner in this dubious category combines all the negatives imaginable: Fraud, Financial recklessness and profligacy, criminal conversion of public and private chattels, disrespect and outright disobedience of the Judiciary and Court Orders, and adds novel negatives such as: clownishness, and perhaps a tint of mental instability (in his very own words). A serial winner in this category, having won it for the past three consecutive years, one can only but imagine the pain of the peoples who have suffered under the rulership of this character have had to endure. To spice up the pain, the Worst Governor for 2018 desperately sought to, and is still expending State resources thereon, to impose his neophyte son-in-law as his successor. Mr. Rochas Okorocha, Governor of Imo State in South East Nigeria, retains the odious title of the Worst Governor for Year 2018.

The Worst Federal Minister/Agency.

Ranging from a Science and Technology minister who, s incredibly as it sounds, had upon assumption of duty in 2015 set for himself and his ministry the dense target of ‘manufacturing Pencils’ (yes, ere pencils, the stuff kids in kindergarten write with) – a target which he yet failed to attain; to a Minister of Defence who is presiding over the worst routing of a conventional army by a gang of renegade terrorists in modern history; to a Minister of Information and Culture who seem to have obtained an international patent of Lies and Deception; to a Minister of Power, Works and Housing who has neither provided Power, Works nor Houses for Nigeria’s teeming population; the current dispensation in Nigeria does not lack unfit and improper characters to bequeath the Award as the Worst Minister for 2018.

There are however agencies of the Federal Government, who by virtue of the responsibilities bestowed upon and actions expected of them, and their woeful inability to deliver have served to ensure Nigeria’s unenviable position as the ‘Poverty Capital’ of the world and a most investor unfriendly destination. Two of these agencies stand out: Firstly, the Central Bank of Nigeria with its voodoo style of Monetary and Fiscal regulations of the financial services sector, a corrupt system of multiple foreign currency exchange rates (which creates spurious wealth for cronies of government, ONLY), and continuing failure to rein in brigands masquerading as Bankers who daily cause the ruination of legitimate entrepreneurs – directly leading to deepening unemployment and rise in crime rates. And, secondly, the Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA), gifted to one of the ring leaders in the BringBackOurGirls gang {a pedestal through which the current regime came into office}. The NPA in the course of the past one year, by the vile failure to open up alternate ports to the ones in the Lagos area, has elevated itself into a gigantean bottleneck in the Nigerian economy, causing massive and globally unprecedented gridlocks in the life-wire of the Nigerian State, in the process short changing and impoverishing the State and its population.

A close context amongst failures, by reason of its ore direct and devious negative impact on the State, the Central Bank of Nigeria is the winner of the 2018 Worst Federal Minister/Agency Awards.   

The Worst Nigerian

Officially a Federation of constituent States, Nigeria is in reality a unitary contraption where the Federal Government is by means of its enormous powers typified by its absolute control of the Law Enforcement, Revenue Generation, mineral Resources, Internal and External Security and Rail and Air transportation mechanisms, the sole authority over all and sundry in Nigeria.

By the defects in its structure, the posterity, stability and economic viability of Nigeria swings with the persona of the person occupying the office of President of the Federal Republic. Where the occupant of this exalted Office has wisdom, the dependence on the individual nuances is minimized and the semblance of a modern State is projected. Where however, as in the present instance, the Office is occupied by an intellectually challenged, constitutionally unqualified, ex-military dictator who has over the years exhibited traits of ethno-religious bigotry, the worst can indeed be expected – and the worst has anifested.

The Nigerian President has seized any and every opportunity he has had in his foreign junkets to de-market Nigeria. From referring to Nigerian youths as ‘Lazy’ – an untruth that serves as a disincentive to foreign investors; to affirming that Nigerians are fantastically corrupt – equally an untruth when placed in the global context and compared with other havens of corruption such as the United Kingdom (where the unfortunate comments were made), Switzerland, et al; and his recent comments in Poland where he directly raised the question whether Nigeria was being ruled by an impostor.

A whooping failure in his self-enumerated focal areas of security and tackling corruption, retired general Muhammadu Buhari, the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, retains the award of the Worst Nigeria for 2018.

Picture: The Worst of Nigeria Awards Trophy