By Stephen Ellis
Two years have gone by since the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) sounded an alarm about West Africa's role in the international drug trade. In 2007, the UNODC published a report identifying the Portuguese-speaking state of Guinea-Bissau in particular as an emerging narco-state that provided a convenient halfway stop for Latin American drug traders exporting to Europe.
Since 2007, there has been a reduction in the seizures of very large cargoes of cocaine brought to West Africa by sea or light aircraft – sometimes more than a tonne at a time - that were the cause of such consternation in 2007. There also appears to have been a decline in the number of West African couriers arriving in Europe’s major airports. Two years ago, the UNODC estimated that about a quarter of Europe’s annual consumption of 135 to 145 tonnes of cocaine, with a wholesale value of some $1.8 billion, was transiting from producers in Latin America via West Africa. Not only was the drug trade undermining the quality of governance in West Africa generally, UNODC director Antonio Maria Costa warned, but drug money could be used to finance future insurgencies.
International observers disagree on how to interpret the new data, and especially the absence of large seizures in recent months. Some believe that major traffickers have been discouraged by the attention now being given to the West Africa route and that they have suffered a setback from political turmoil in Guinea-Bissau and the confusingly-named Republic of Guinea, its French–speaking neighbour. In the former, President Nino Vieira was murdered earlier this year, while in Guinea-Conakry a populist military leader has very publicly taken on leading drug interests. However, police sources with access to phone intercepts are adamant that major cargoes are still crossing from Latin America to West Africa.
What appears to be taking place is that trafficking patterns are changing in reaction to market conditions. This is quite a common occurrence in a trade known for its flexibility.
One undoubted innovation is the emergence of a significant new cocaine-smuggling route with the opening this year of direct flights from São Paulo to Dakar and Istanbul, operated by Turkish Airways. Major seizures on this route indicate that traffickers are now using the only direct airlink from South America to the West African mainland to transport cargoes to the edge of the European Union. In regard to political conditions, there is no doubt that turmoil in Guinea-Conakry has led to a mass exodus by the Latin American traffickers who were based there until early 2009. On the other hand, the seizure by police in mid-2009 of drug-making equipment at seven locations around Conakry proves that Guinea now has a drug-manufacturing capacity, probably used for making ecstasy tablets and for refining cocaine.
Some European governments now share the longstanding concern of U.S. authorities about the possible financing of extreme political groups in northwest Africa by drug money. Heavily armed convoys of four-wheel drive vehicles transport drug cargoes, including cocaine, hundreds of miles from west to east across the Sahara, from Mauritania to Niger and probably beyond. Their route lies through territory where the organization known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb holds sway. AQIM consists largely of Algerian Islamists, still waging a war with their home government after nearly two decades. What happens to the cross-desert drug cargoes after they leave Niger is unclear. They may be delivered to Egypt, for further transmission by container to Europe, or they may be feeding a consumer market in Egypt and the Middle East.
U.S. diplomats, mindful of the violence perpetrated by drug gangs in Mexico, are concerned about the possible emergence of a similar drugs-guns-politics nexus in West Africa. West Africa’s drug trade is entwined with the political economy of several of the region’s leading countries. Drug money has become closely linked to political finance in Ghana especially, and yet this country is generally regarded as West Africa’s most promising democracy as well as being an emerging oil producer.
The main reason for the growth in the drug trade throughout the region is the exceptionally favourable context provided not only by its geographical location halfway between South America and Europe, but by ineffective policing, bribeable governments, and a relative lack of international attention. As the Colombian economist Francisco Thoumi has noted in regard to the drug trade, “illegality generates competitive advantages in the countries or regions that have the weakest rule of law.” It is for this reason that West Africa attracts traders not only in drugs but also in other niches of globalized services, such as dumping unwanted home computers. The narcotics trade has a longer history in West Africa than is generally realized – a heroin pipeline from Lebanon to the USA via West Africa existed almost sixty years ago.
There are no instant solutions to a problem that has such deep roots in the political economy of a region. New legislation is hardly the answer, since narcotics are already illegal, and police forces and law courts are generally weak. Also to be treated warily is any suggestion of providing under-equipped police services with the radios, vehicles, guns, and other hardware that might enable them to act more effectively against drug traffickers. In Guinea-Bissau, drug trafficking takes place largely under military protection, and therefore equipping the police with counter-trafficking materials is most likely to prime armed conflict between rival services in a country that has already had some experience of civil war.
On the positive side, there is undoubtedly scope for launching a campaign to inform public opinion, for while the drug trade generally has a bad reputation among West Africans, cocaine and heroin are considered to be a problem of consumers in the rich world rather than of the Africans who trade them. Yet in reality there are now serious numbers of people addicted to hard drugs in major cities throughout West Africa. Anyone pursuing the idea of public information should learn from the mistakes made by AIDS education campaigns. Trying to shock people into awareness may not be the best technique for public health education in West Africa.
The starting-point for policy-makers should be a deeper analysis of West Africa’s many “fragile” states than has generally been forthcoming. When war broke out in Liberia in 1989, spreading from there to neighbouring countries, it was for many years regarded by members of the UN Security Council as a regional issue rather than a threat to peace and security on a larger scale. For too long they ignored the effects of the conflict on international trades in illicit goods. Since the end of the last century, the solution to the region’s wars favoured by the Security Council and major donors has generally been to encourage peace accords and then send in UN missions with a brief to hold elections. Although the United Kingdom and France have both taken bilateral action, this has been much more effective militarily than politically.
West Africa’s coastal states have been shaped by their implication in the commerce of the North Atlantic since the slave trade. Western countries need to discuss with the region’s governments how international input can create more effective sovereignties over the longer term, including in regard to air traffic control and patrolling of territorial waters. Even China, a rising power in all of Africa, may come to appreciate the usefulness of this approach. Hip youngsters in Hong Kong already have a taste for the same illicit drugs as their counterparts in America and Europe; soon millions of other young Chinese will no doubt emulate them, creating a mass market for consumer drugs. Meanwhile, the intensity of China’s relationship with Africa has led to the emergence of a substantial West African diaspora in Hong Kong and Guangzhou that is already a medium for smugglers. West African drugs could become China’s problem sooner than we think. An international problem requires an international solution.
Stephen Ellis is the Desmond Tutu professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences, VU University Amsterdam and a senior researcher Africa Studiecentrum, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Related Articles:
Louis Charbonneau, "West Africa May Become Major Producer of Narcotics--UN," Reuters, 5 November 2009.
"How a tiny West African country became the world's first narco state," The Guardian, 9 March 2008.
Thomas Harrigan, "Confronting Drug Trafficking in West Africa," Statement before the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 23 June 2009.
Drug Trafficking as a Security Threat in West Africa, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, November 2008.
