It was not only the general economic climate of the 1970s that caused some people to turn to crime as a means of livelihood but also some of the institutional arrangements that were introduced to stimulate trade, like the creation of ECOWAS in 1975, which facilitated movement between member States.
After the end of the oil boom in Nigeria, in the early 1980s, Nigerians were also impelled to spread throughout the region and further afield in search of economic opportunity, and to seek out a livelihood, if necessary by any means. It is now firmly held that organised crime was first introduced in Sierra Leone by Nigerians.
Organised crime is regarded as having started in Côte d’Ivoire too in the 1970s, when the country attracted large numbers of immigrants in search of work. A problem of armed robbery emerged, as bands composed of immigrants were formed, later joined by Ivorians.
Civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone have facilitated the import of firearms by armed groups, including armed robbers, to Côte d’Ivoire. A roughly similar development appears to have occurred in Senegal, where armed robbery, marijuana-trading and weapons-trafficking have been connected to the emergence of a low-intensity armed conflict in the Casamance region since the early 1980s.
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| Casamance Rebels |
In Ghana, organised crime appears also to have emerged in the 1980s, connected to the problems and the opportunities offered by international migration.
Ghanaians were among the first West Africans in modern times to migrate widely, particularly with the onset of major economic problems in the 1970s, benefiting from the country’s generally high standard of education, the large number of people speaking good English.
Crime, Society and Corruption
A first point to be noted is that all West Africa’s current sovereign States, with the exception of Liberia, became independent only within the last 50 years. One of the features of colonial government, as also of the rule of Americo-Liberian settlers in Liberia, was the criminalisation by the state of a variety of activities that may not have been considered in precisely the same terms by many West Africans. In considering the West African role in the drug trade, it is quite common for West Africans to argue that it is not they who consider certain narcotics as illegal, but only those Western countries that once colonised them and are now the main consumers of these said narcotics.
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| Armed Robbers West Africa |
Certainly, it is not impoverishment alone that is the cause of a growth of organized crime in West Africa. The frequency of military coups in the region, and the spread of war since the late 1980s, have created general uncertainty surrounding wealth and the manner of its acquisition. For example, the January 2004 arrest of an international smuggling gang in Ghana that had imported 675 kilograms of cocaine, with a street value estimated at US$140 million, led to the suspects being released on bail of just US$200,000, causing a great outcry in the press. There are other examples from Ghana suggesting that criminals are able to bribe judges, while in Côte d’Ivoire a minister of justice has hinted at a very similar state of affairs, referring to the country’s justice system as broken.
Transparency International publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index. In its 2003 Index, Ghana ranks at number 50, Senegal 66, Côte d’Ivoire 71 (the same as the Russian Federation and India), while Nigeria was ranked at 101, reckoned the second most corrupt country in the world.
International drug trafficking is a crime to which governments in Europe and the United States devote very considerable attention, and in which West African groups are reported to play an important role.
For example, DEA finds that: “Trafficking groups composed of West African criminals ... smuggle [South-East Asian] heroin to the United States.
Nigerian criminals have been most active in US cities and areas with well established Nigerian populations, such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, Dallas, New York City, Newark, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Over the past several years, Chicago has become a hub for heroin trafficking controlled by Nigerian criminals who primarily deal in[Asian] heroin.
In the case of West Africa, statistics are more than usually hard to come by, no police force in West Africa publishes comprehensive figures on crime seizures or arrests.
West African police forces generally have very poor or non-existent crime intelligence capacities, meaning that they have no systematic ability to extrapolate from available knowledge to estimate the size of criminal activity as a whole.
One of the few lessons, however, that can be drawn from seizures of drugs within West Africa or transported via West Africa is that the region does play a significant role in the international transport of drugs.
Côte d’Ivoire appears to be a major transit-point for heroin en route to Europe, and Ghana for cocaine headed for the same destination, although why there should be such specialisation between these two countries is unclear. While the organisers of these narcotics trades are of diverse nationalities, a considerable number are themselves West Africans. Much of the cocaine passing through Ghana and other countries of the region appears previously to have transited via Nigeria.
Modes of operation
West African organised crime is project based. In this sense, criminal enterprises in West Africa use similar techniques to legitimate traders and business people typical of lineage-based societies.
The standard procedure is for an individual entrepreneur who succeeds in making money in a particular field, as the volume of business grows, to invite one or more junior relatives or other dependants to join himself or herself in the business.
These newcomers effectively become apprentices to the original entrepreneur. If further manpower is required, other personnel may be recruited (also via personal acquaintances or relatives) for a specific task, but not otherwise retained in permanent employment.61 One of the consequences of this mode of operation is that it tends to create very strong associations between specific families, lineages, or ethnic groups and particular trades and is nearly impossible to infiltrate for law enforcement.
agencies. It should be noted that this casual and ad hoc approach to organization makes detection extremely difficult. Police services from various parts of the world report that the interrogation of an intercepted drug courier from West Africa often reveals frustratingly little about the principals who have employed the courier, often for a wage of no more than a few thousand dollars, to carry drugs across international borders. In many cases it is apparent
that the couriers genuinely know almost nothing about the people employing them, as this is not done on the basis of an enduring relationship.
Also contributing to the difficulty of persuading intercepted couriers or other criminals to divulge information is the common practice of criminals obliging their junior associates to swear an oath of secrecy on a traditional oracle. Such an oath may imply the death of the individual who breaks it, causing great fear. More prosaically, the administrator of an oath, or the persons who cause the administration, may punish the family in West Africa of a criminal associate who betrays a secret to the police.Two aspects of this mode of organization are particularly worth noting for present purposes. First, we have said, the practice whereby a successful entrepreneur recruits personnel for specific projects only, rather than hiring them on a permanent basis, poses considerable difficulties to law enforcement officers.
This makes it difficult for law enforcement officers to build up accurate information on the
major figures in such a business. Second, the practice of recruiting through networks of kinship, typically based on a village or other region of origin, means that the organization of a smuggling or other criminal network may be facilitated by cultural codes known to the perpetrators, but more or less impenetrable to outsiders, including law enforcement
officers.
The effect of recruitment through personal networks is also to create an association between certain trades and specific places. Nigerian networks of prostitution, for example, are frequently associated with Edo State and with Benin City because those individuals who pioneered the trade have kept it in the hands of networks of kin and associates, thus excluding outsiders.
For example, a Nigerian law enforcement officer noted that drug-trafficking networks appear to be dominated by Igbo-speaking people from south-east Nigeria and Yoruba from the south-west, and by southern minority groups. Relationships of this sort enable successful drug-smuggling gangs to become “vertically integrated”, having associates at every stage of the trading chain from buying at source (for example, heroin purchased in bulk in Pakistan) to the point of retail sale (typically, at street-level in North America or Europe), with every stage in between being handled by members of the same network.
This both ensures maximum profitability and also enables Nigerian drug-networks to co-exist with the more hierarchical, cartel style operations who may dominate particular aspects of the trade, such as the more powerful Colombian criminal groups that may deal in very large quantities of cocaine.
Heroin trafficking routes to West Africa are clearly linked to the routes of commercial passenger flights, notably Ethiopian Airlines flights from Bangkok, Mumbai and Karachi, transitting via Addis Ababa, Beirut and Dubai en route to West Africa; Kenya Airways, which flies from South Asian airports via Nairobi and Dubai; Emirates;
Air Gabon, which runs a service from Dubai to Cotonou; and Middle East Airlines, which runs services from several Middle Eastern locations to West Africa.
The most important entry points of heroin to West Africa are Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo. Virtually all the heroin trafficked to West Africa seems to originate from Pakistan and India, with just one seizure reported of heroin from Thailand.
Specialists in different aspects of organised crime in West Africa have made the observation that long-term specialisation in a particular field or commodity is rather rare. An entrepreneur who has been successful in one field of operation may move into another field if the opportunity presents itself, including into legitimate commerce.
For example, an entrepreneur who has been successful in the drug trade may invest his or her profits in a legitimate business, not purely as a form of camouflage, but simply in pursuit of a commercial logic. By the same token, an entrepreneur who has become established in a field such as the import of cars or spare parts may use the capital, the infrastructure and the commercial contacts thus acquired to move into a narco commerce.
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| Cape Verde Bust |
The Cape Verde islands are West Africa’s main entry point for cocaine, although Ghana, Nigeria and Togo also play important roles. Most of the cocaine brought into West Africa is re-exported to other destinations, especially Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom. There is also an important import and re-export trade in heroin, notably from South Asia.
The key entry points are Ethiopia and Kenya, with Egypt to a lesser extent. Cargoes are then trafficked from East to West Africa, almost entirely by air courier, with Côte d’Ivoire forming the hub of the trade in West Africa.
According to almost all accounts, it was pioneered in this region by Nigerians, soon joined by others, and police forces in Ghana and Sierra Leone both allege that drug trafficking was introduced to their countries largely by Nigerian seeking new operating locations. Of couriers intercepted with drugs transiting through West Africa,according to statistics compiled since 2000, 92 per cent were West Africans and no less than 56 per cent were Nigerians.
Moreover, a few of the remaining 8 per cent were West Africans who had acquired a second nationality through naturalisation. One experiment at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport involved screening passengers arriving from Aruba and the Dutch Antilles—a favourite drug-smuggling route used by some of the 1,200 couriers arrested at Schiphol airport.
When Dutch customs officers noticed the increasing numbers of Nigerians using the route, they experimented by checking every single Nigerian arriving at Schiphol from Aruba or the Dutch Antilles for a period of 10 days, rather than operating the usual spot-checks only. They found that of 83 Nigerian passengers using the route over those 10 days, no fewer than 63 were carrying drugs.
Law enforcement agencies in a wide variety of countries, including the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, all report the regular interception of Nigerian drug couriers, and their police intelligence services believe that some Nigerian networks have developed extensive working relationships with Colombian, Brazilian, Venezuelan, Caribbean, Mexican and European cartels, in effect receiving subcontracts from these major operators who have tended traditionally to operate in more hierarchical structures than the Nigerians.
It appears that, whereas the old-established cartels may have the ability to transport ton quantities of narcotics to the United States, the most successful Nigerian syndicates import smaller quantities but enjoy an exceptional range of contacts and an impressive flexibility of organisation that enable them to exploit market niches that the major DTOs cannot always reach. It is by these means that Nigerian drug traders have managed to gain a major stake in what is, literally, the world’s most violent market, yet without themselves using violence.
Several West African countries are used as a base by organised networks of drug traffickers with international connections. Very large shipments via West Africa, to judge from the evidence of a handful of major seizures, tend to be controlled by non-Africans having one or more local accomplices. In addition, there are significant numbers of West Africans who may attempt to smuggle narcotics from Latin America or South Asia to Europe or North America in smaller quantities, not more than a few kilograms, either directly or through West Africa.
There are certain consistencies in the routes taken by intercepted couriers or transporters of narcotics. Thus, many Nigerian individuals and networks seem to be working through Casablanca, using it as a staging-post for cargoes of cocaine from South America. There appear to be two ways in which couriers can use a north-south detour to minimise the risk of detection. The first way is for a courier to travel from South America, transit for example via London, and disembark in Casablanca, Bamako or Accra.
The law enforcement capacities for a thorough check at one of these latter airports are a lot weaker than in London, and therefore the risk of detection is less. A second method is for a courier to travel from South America via a relatively low-risk country, such as Senegal, en route to Amsterdam. On arrival, there is much less attention paid to passengers disembarking from Senegal in comparison to those coming from the Dutch Antilles, for example. Ethiopian Airlines is an airline favoured by heroin couriers, probably since it has convenient routes from Asia to West Africa.
There is evidence that drug trafficking networks in the region have the capacity to corrupt government official and influence the outcome of criminal justice processes. Although the press often refers to “drug barons” and “drug mafias”, there is actually no evidence for the existence of West African drug cartels in the sense of hierarchical, rather permanent, corporation-like structures. Evidence suggests that participants start on a small scale, for example as individuals who try their luck as couriers, or as traders in legitimate goods who diversify into the illegal sector. Over the last decade West Africa has taken its place as a key export zone for organised crime, represented most clearly by its use as a transit point for drug trafficking and as a source for fraudulent activity. The future development of the region is threatened by high levels of organised crime, which erode trust in government and encourage corruption.
The opportunities associated with involvement in organised crime in West Africa are not matched by the risks, the growth and specific nature of organised crime in the region reflects, in part, severe problems with state capacity.
Although most countries in the world no doubt experience a problem of organised crime to greater or lesser extent, the evidence available does suggest that West African criminal entrepreneurs have, in the last decade, grown to become global players.
