Africa--highway to drug hell?

Africa has become a highway for Asian heroin into the United States, the US Department of Justice's Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reported in a February special review. "Violent Nigerian cartels pose a sophisticated threat to US drug enforcement efforts," it warned.

The recently released report on African drug trafficking highlights some startling facts. It describes in graphic detail the increasingly dangerous methods of concealment being used by African couriers to transport Asian heroin.

Carried by 'swallowers', who ingest as many as 150 egg-sized condoms filled with the deadly cargo, the pure heroin is smuggled through coastal towns in eastern India to Africa and on to the United States and Europe. Though highly effective, this dangerous method of transportation has resulted in numerous deaths when defective condoms burst in the stomachs of their human carriers. Nigerian cartels operating out of both the United States and their homeland have become so sophisticated at such operations that a US-based, ethnic Nigerian gang called the Blackstone Rangers has set up its own training school in Chicago to teach couriers of all nationalities how to avoid detection by customs and border officials. As such it has developed the smuggling of heroin into a fine art.

Thousands of smugglers from Nigeria and other West African countries have been arrested in recent years by both US and European authorities. The number of arrests started as a trickle in 1980, became a torrent in the 90s and now constitutes an epidemic, the DEA claims. And West Africans are not the only nationalities involved. Kenyans, South Africans, Ugandans, Somalis along with American teenagers and military personnel, are increasingly chancing incarceration to make an overnight fortune that can be as much as $100,000 for one successful delivery.

Shotgunning

The US report tells of technique used by a US-based Nigerian cartel called the 'Vice Lords' known as 'shotgunning'. Multiple couriers travel on the same flight virtually guaranteeing that at least some of the shipment will get through in the confusion of a busy entry point terminal. It is a technique which has long overwhelmed customs officers in Britain's Heathrow airport.

Typically, Asian heroin is moved to the US in stages. One courier picks up a shipment in Bangkok, Thailand, and flies it to a transit country such as India, Indonesia or Egypt. There the shipment is handed over to a second courier who brings it to another transit country such as Kenya before the drugs are brought to the United States by family members visiting relatives or by returning college students. This use of multiple couriers and trans-shipment points conceals any direct link with Thailand, the source country for much of the US-bound heroin.

As fast as the DEA sets up procedures to intercept drug shipments via the transit countries, new channels of transportation are opened. The seizure of a $13.6m haul of Asian hashish in Mombasa, Kenya by antinarcotics detectives is proof that the trade is increasingly being routed through previously unaffected African locations. A recent UN report highlighted Kenya as being the leading drug trafficking point in East Africa, with the northern Lamu archipelago bordering Somali being a smuggler's paradise (see African Business last month). Virtually un-policed, Kenya's northern coastline is dotted with thousands of small islands and estuaries, providing a perfect location for drug smugglers to ply their trade.

Dropping their loads off shore, the cargo is retrieved by fishermen when it's carried inshore by the tides. Somali warlords north of the border are now reported to consider the routing of Asian heroin through their territories as their main source of income.

Once in Kenya the heroin is re-exported to the United States where it is sold on street corners in suburbs where large concentradons of Nigerian nationals reside and where 90% of the drugs sold are of the black tar southeast Asian variety. With astronomical mark-ups and an insatiable demand, some traffickers are even resorting to express mail deliveries just to keep up with business, the DEA report claims.

South Africa is main consumer

In Africa, South Africa is the major consumer for Asian heroin as well as the leading market for hallucinogenic drugs. Mandrax, a popular depressant used by drug addicts in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana, is widely available on the streets of Johannesburg and Durban. In a raid on the Plasmex plastics pipe factory in Maputo, Mozambique in early February, South African and Mozambican police netted 300kg of methaqualone powder meant for the manufacture of some 30m Mandrax tablets worth an estimated street value of R900m. Owned 20% by the Mozambican government, 50% by Maputo businessman Andre Ernesto Timana and 30% by Jacinto Luis Nhamoneque - none of whom would comment on the raid - the factory housed machinery used to produce Mandrax tablets that were seized by authorities in a 1995 drug bust in the Matolo suburb of Trevo city. In that raid, the machinery had been moved just before the police arrived in an obvious tip-off, only to re-appear in the Plasmex factory during the latest seizure.

The Department of Justice report highlights the corruption of foreign officials as being its biggest problem in tackling the problem of drug smuggling through African countries. Trafficking in heroin is a tremendously lucrative operation, with profits running into the many thousands of percent. In countries where corruption is rampant, it is extremely difficult to plan counter-measures without them being compromised at an early stage due to the involvement of high political officials.

"Since protocol requires the notification by US authorities of any interdiction efforts planned in a foreign country, it is almost impossible for us to mount effective countermeasures," a Reno, Nevada prosecutor familiar with East Africa claims on condition of anonymity. Citing the example of Kenya where the manhunt for Ibrahim Abdalla Akasha - in whose house the $13.2m-worth of hashish was found - has proved singularly ineffective, he stated: "Such middlemen are often involved with top politicians who ensure their protection in order to prevent their own exposure."

Females take the lead

Most African countries are signatories to the 1988 Vienna Convention on Drug Control. To curb the alarming trend of increased use of hard drugs in their own nations, top narcotics and customs officials met in Johannesburg in 1998 to map out a joint strategy to ensure a `drug free southern Africa'. Funded by the UN International Drug Control Program (UNDCP), experts from Botswana, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe sought to implement a joint programme.

"At a time when national borders are increasingly under assault from drug traffickers seeking to compromise national sovereignty in pursuit of their illicit trade, regional cooperation assumes critical importance," the UNDCP said in a statement released after the conference.

Political battle over cannabis

The transit of hard drugs through their countries is not the only concern for the overwhelmed anti-narcotics agents in Africa's front-line battle with international cartels. Cannabis is increasingly being grown for both local and European consumption in eastern Africa. In a 67-page report released by the Vienna-based International Narcotics Board, Nigeria, Morocco, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal and the Ivory Coast are pin-pointed as major producers of marijuana. With vast tracts of forest concealing plantations of marijuana, it is almost impossible to eradicate the trade at its source.

"In many countries the drug control coordinating bodies have been hindered by a lack of authority, recognition and team work and we have witnessed an increasingly politicised battle over the cannabis plant," says Paul Salay of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP) in Pretoria, South Africa. Elaborating further, he stated that: "Authorities are under pressure for cannabis to be legislated as a medicinal drug by involved politicians."

In 1995 the DEA launched its first operation against African drug cartels. Dubbed operation `Global Sea', it targeted all levels of a Nigerian-based distribution organisation, from its primary US distributor to its major source of supply in Thailand. A unique aspect of this organisation was the prominent role that women played, particularly as it was directed by a Ms. Kafayat Majekodunni and 15 other Nigerian females. Highly structured and well-organised, the network smuggled $26m-worth of high purity Asian heroin from Bangkok to Chicago. The arrest of Ms Majekodunni and 24 other defendants in 1996 resulted in 72 kilos of pure heroin being seized in France, Mexico and the Netherlands, with a further $200,000 and two kilos of 80% pure heroin being confiscated in the US.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration is now turning its attention to the multiple organisations that sprung up to replace the cartel they dismantled. To that end it has opened new offices in Pretoria, South Africa and Lagos, Nigeria. Since the scourge of drug abuse is now seriously affecting the economies of the emerging democracies of modern Africa, the populations of Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa and the many other African nations affected can only hope that the corruption that protects such drug cartels is tackled by their own police and criminal investigation divisions. After all, if the prominent Mombasa Muslim leader Sheikh Khalid Balala can locate the missing owner of the house in which the $13.2m-worth of heroin was found, why can't detectives of the Kenya anti-narcotics squad do so? Or is it that the culprits are being protected by powerful businessmen and influential politicians as Sheikh Balala claims?

The US Justice department's report concludes by reiterating the DEA's intention to pursue American indictments against major African drug traffickers on the basis that they have committed "crimes against American citizens". The scourge of drug abuse has also hit African populations, who are demand ing that their own counter-narcotics agencies do the same for their own citizens.