SPECIAL REPORT: West Africa's Alarming Growth Industry – Methamphetamine

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo now heads the West African Commission on Drugs (Image source: wacommissionondrugs.org)

By David Lewis (Reuters)

When customs officers in the sleepy Senegalese town of Koumpentoum discovered a stash of pills hidden in a bus from Mali in late February, they initially thought it was counterfeit medicine.

They stored the haul, poorly concealed in blue plastic bags and a yellow jerry can, in the back of the customs office. Its owner escaped, slipping away into the sprawl of shacks and hawkers.

Days later, according to two officials involved in the seizure, a top officer from regional headquarters took a closer look at the trove and identified it as the drug methamphetamine. The 81 kg (179 pounds) stash was worth an estimated US$12 million or more based on the street price for the drug in Tokyo, where much of it ends up.  

The seizure was one of three in Senegal so far this year. It highlights the new and fast-growing role West Africa is playing in the global drug trade, not just as a transit point for drugs but also as a producer of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS).

Smugglers of Moroccan hashish have long crossed West Africa on their way to Europe or Asia. Over the past decade, the region has also become a major transit point for Latin American cocaine headed to Europe. But local and international officials say West African criminal groups are now producing and exporting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of methamphetamine – or meth – every year, most of it shipped to Asia.

Climate dictates where cocaine, heroin or hashish are produced, but there are no such constraints on meth. The synthetic drug is derived from ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, two medicines that are used to treat ailments from nasal decongestion to asthma. As anyone who has seen the television series “Breaking Bad” knows, meth can be manufactured even with basic equipment and a simple understanding of chemistry. The potential profits are huge: One kilo of meth costs around US$1,500 to make in West Africa but sells for around US$150,000 in Japan.

Senegalese police prepare to incinerate methamphetamines seized at the Malian border in Tambacounda, Senegal, June 29, 2014. Reuters/Pape Demba Sidibe

The powerful stimulant is smoked, swallowed, snorted or injected by hundreds of thousands of users there, in the United States and elsewhere. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says meth is increasingly popular in East and Southeast Asia. Meth gives users an intense rush, heightens attention and curbs appetite. It is highly addictive. Over time, addicts usually suffer anxiety, weight loss and tooth decay.

One reason West Africa is a good production zone, according to law enforcement officials, is the region’s weak controls on imports of meth ingredients. Imported legally for use in products such as cold medicine, they can easily be diverted and transformed into meth by boiling, filtering and then combining them with other chemicals.

Pierre Lapaque, head of UNODC in West and Central Africa, puts production of the drug in West Africa at around 1.5 tonnes per year. That’s small by world standards – just a little over one percent of the 107 tonnes that was seized around the globe in 2012. But it is up from zero in the region just five years ago.  

“It is pretty alarming,” Lapaque said.

Nigerian authorities have discovered 10 labs since 2010. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo told Reuters that political leaders needed to wake up to the fact the region had become a producer.

Obasanjo now heads the West African Commission on Drugs and said the production of meth in the region was raising the threat of drug-fueled instability. “It is now affecting our politics because money earned from drugs is going into politics,” he said. “You have drug barons who are now sponsoring politicians, or who (are) in fact going into politics themselves.”

Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said one sign of the growing importance of West Africa was the arrival of Latin American producers, including Mexicans. Mexican drug gangs play a central role in the meth industry in North America. Payne said Mexicans have helped set up clandestine labs – known as “clan labs” – in Nigeria.

“They are not just mom and pop labs, they are big labs,” Payne said. “Mexicans aren’t going to come over and train (people) unless they are dealing in large amounts.”

NOT READY FOR METH

Africa’s place in the synthetic drug market was, until recent years, limited to South Africa, which has a domestic market and feeds the global supply chain.

The surge in production elsewhere on the continent is part of a broader boom in the global amphetamine-type market. UNODC says annual methamphetamine seizures more than doubled between 2010 and 2012.

The first sign that synthetic drugs were being produced in West Africa came in 2009 when chemicals including MDP-2-P, used to make ecstasy, were found at a lab raided in Guinea. UNODC estimates some US$100 million of ecstasy could have been produced from the precursors found there.

The same year, a Nigerian expelled from China was arrested with a manual on how to cook meth, said Ahmadu Giade, head of Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency.

“Nigeria at that time wasn’t prepared for that type of drug because we knew nothing about it,” said Giade. He sent a team to South Africa to investigate how police there handled meth labs.

In 2010, Nigerian agents stumbled across a meth lab in a place called Monkey Village. Sunday Drambi Ziramgey, commander of a National Drug Law Enforcement Agency team, was one of the first on the scene. He described a bungalow where each of the four rooms housed a different stage of the cooking process. In the kitchen, they found cooking pots, burners and compressing machines. A web of light bulbs had been strung up to dry the meth.

A clandestine methamphetamine laboratory is seen inside a compound at Monkey Village in Lagos, Nigeria, in this undated photograph taken from a National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) PowerPoint presentation provided to Reuters, July 9, 2015.  Reuters/NDLEA/Handout via Reuters

A 2010 U.S. investigation into cocaine smuggling in Liberia also uncovered plans to produce meth in the country for shipment to the United States and Japan. A 2011 report by Nigerian law enforcement officials, seen by Reuters, details a step-by-step guide for meth production and distribution which was taken from a Nigerian deported from China. The guide included contacts in Ghana, Iran, Thailand and China who would help find couriers and buyers for meth.        

A senior DEA official listed Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana and Guinea-Bissau as possible locations for meth labs.

Mame Seydou Ndour, Senegal’s anti-drug tsar, said making meth across the region had multiple advantages. “The transport cost is reduced. There is less risk in Africa. Labor is cheaper here too – with poverty there are plenty of people who are ready to get involved,” he said. 

THE NIGERIAN CONNECTION    

As with many other industries, Nigeria dominates meth production in West Africa. It’s home to Africa’s biggest population and some of the region’s most established criminal gangs, according to drugs experts.

Those gangs have connections with experienced Latin American “cooks,” such as three Bolivians detained in one lab raid. But Nigerian gangs can now run the trade themselves, and have established global networks to distribute the finished product.

The DEA official said there had been several reported instances in Nigeria this year of 25 to 50 kg of ephedrine being diverted from registered pharmaceutical companies. “This, on top of the smuggled precursors, readily supplies meth production,” the official said.

Giade, Nigeria’s top anti-drug cop, said most of the precursors used in Nigerian meth production came from India. Some of the chemicals are approved for import by Nigeria’s national food and drug regulator, he said, while others are smuggled in illegally, “because we have porous borders.” Giade cited the border to the west with Benin as a major weak point.

In 2014 the Nigerian government told the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB)it needed 9.65 tonnes of ephedrine for legitimate businesses. India alone supplied Nigeria with 9.2 tonnes last year, according to a Reuters analysis of official ephedrine exports listed on Indian trade website www.zauba.com, which collates data from ports and customs authorities. It is not clear how much ephedrine Nigeria imported from other suppliers.

“India is legally doing business, but African nations should be checking if the amounts ordered are in line with what is needed by the different factories using ephedrine,” said UNODC’s Lapaque.

NEW NETWORKS

West African meth production is still far off the levels in Mexico, where officials seized 19 tonnes last year and discovered a string of so-called super labs. But local groups are beginning to make inroads into lucrative markets in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Japan.

Law enforcement officials say Nigerian criminal groups use extensive networks of human mules. Several officials in West Africa said Nigerians have begun to employ Europeans with clean passports, who are likely to raise less suspicion in Asia. In December 2013, a German man and an Austrian woman were arrested in Jakarta after they were caught having flown in from Dakar with meth hidden in their luggage, local media reported.

Police in London and Paris last year arrested eight Europeans who had left West Africa and were headed to Asia, each carrying 2 to 6 kg of meth, one foreign law enforcement official told Reuters.

In an effort to stop the industry becoming entrenched, Payne said the DEA is helping local officials by detecting and dismantling clandestine labs.

“They basically have a three-headed monster now in Africa,” Payne said. “They have the coke problem from South America, the heroin from Afghanistan, and the home-grown meth that is making its way to South Africa and Asia. We’re trying to address it as we can, but that is tough.”

This is a Reuters original investigation.

Video from wacommissionondrugs.org

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OPEN LETTER TO THE AFRICAN UNION ON THE RESURGENCE OF XENOPHOBIC VIOLENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA

An image of the xenophobic attacks taken in 2008 being wrongly attributed to the 2015 attacks

Written by SALC/MARAVIPOST

We, the undersigned organizations, write to you as concerned organizations and citizens of the African continent to raise concern about the xenophobic attacks in the Republic of South Africa which have recently taken place against migrants and refugees predominantly from other African countries. We approach you as the body responsible for promoting unity and solidarity among African states. We also call on you as the body responsible for the promotion of peace, security and stability in Africa.

The objectives of the AU are inter alia:-

• To achieve greater unity and solidarity between the African countries and the peoples of Africa;

• To encourage international cooperation, taking due account of the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;

• To promote peace, security, and stability on the continent;

• To promote democratic principles and institutions, popular participation and good governance;

• To promote and protect human and peoples' rights in accordance with the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and other relevant human rights instruments.

Between 2000 and March 2008, at least 67 people died in what were identified as xenophobic attacks in South Africa. In May 2008, a series of rapid large-scale attacks left 62 people dead and over 600 injured. Twenty-one of those killed were South African citizens, apparently because they were perceived as foreigners. The attacks were apparently motivated by xenophobia, [i] and have continued to occur every year since 2009. And more recently in 2015, another nationwide spike in xenophobic attacks against migrants and refugees occurred in January and again in April. The latter attacks which began in KwaZulu-Natal Province prompted a number of foreign governments to repatriate their citizens. The April 2015 attacks resulted in at least seven verified deaths, but the number is understood to be higher, and at least 5,000 migrants and refugees displaced.

We urge the AU to call upon the South African government to take concrete steps to end these attacks, prosecute perpetrators and protect migrants and refugees living in their territory from violations of their human rights, including the right to life. As organizations operating on the African continent, we are particularly concerned about the loss of lives, injuries to persons, damage to private property and the infringement of dignity of migrants and refugees living in South Africa, which are a grave violation of their rights protected under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the African Charter). The right to life, not to be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and the right to strict equality before the law are non-derogable rights – not dependent on a person’s status in a country.

South African President Jacob Zuma during a Freedom Day event in April made a statement that Mozambican national Emmanuel Sithole (aka Emmanuel Josias) who was brutally killed during these attacks was an illegal immigrant using a false name.[ii] The immigration status of foreign nationals who are victims of the attacks in South Africa is irrelevant. South Africa has an obligation to protect all persons within its borders.

We are concerned in particular about the situation of asylum seekers and refugees who should receive special protection but who are in a vulnerable and desperate situation following these tensions.

We are further concerned by comments made by persons in positions of authority and influence which may amount to incitement to violence and the role that these persons play in perpetuating xenophobia and intolerance. While some official statements have been made to condemn the violence, we are concerned that not enough concrete steps are being taken to prevent such attacks, prosecute perpetrators, protect migrants and refugees and prevent the mass coerced exodus of foreign nationals from the country. We call on the AU to ensure that South Africa holds leaders and persons in authority accountable for their role in inciting violence and intolerance, or for the systematic failure since 2008 to implement effective prevention and protection plans for migrants and refugees at risk of attack, property destruction and displacement.

We note statements of several governments, including the South African government, to provide assistance for individuals leaving the country. While those who wish to leave should be assisted to do so, the solution to the violence should not be to repatriate all foreign nationals, but to ensure an environment in the country in which their rights are protected. Furthermore, the acts of those carrying out attacks against foreign nationals should not be rewarded by assisting them to achieve their objective of ridding South Africa of foreign nationals.

Following the xenophobic attacks in April there have been nationwide police raids, with military presence on the streets, apparently intended to combat crime, but predominately involve arresting and deporting migrants alleged to be illegally present in the country. We call on the AU to alert South Africa to the unlawfulness of these actions. According to the Department of Home Affairs, 2767 foreign nationals have been repatriated since the April attacks began.[iii] This includes some 913 Malawians, 637 Mozambicans, 17 Tanzanians and 1098 Zimbabweans. There were also reports that an estimated 400 men and women from Lesotho were deported. These repatriations and deportations are ongoing. We are concerned about the mass raids, rounding up of foreigners and ongoing deportations which do not appear to adhere to any procedural safeguards[iv] such as investigations into immigration status; access to legal representation; ability to make representations to a court and steps taken to ensure that no refugees and asylum-seekers, to whom a duty of international protection applies, are not subjected to forcible returns. In this regard, we remind all States of the provisions of Article 12 of the African Charter which prohibits the mass expulsion of foreign nationals. We are also concerned by the heavy handed approach adopted by the South African authorities in carrying out raids and mass arrests with a view to deporting foreign nationals as a response to xenophobia. This was most recently highlighted in “Operation Fiela” which took place in Johannesburg during May. Despite Cabinet’s statements to the contrary this operation has targeted foreigners at a higher rate than citizens.

We refer the AU to the African Commission’s statement in its decision on mass expulsions from Angola[v] which continue to be highly relevant to the current situation in South Africa:

“The Commission concedes that African States in general … are faced with many challenges, mainly economic. In the face of such difficulties, States often resort to radical measures aimed at protecting their nationals and their economies from non‑nationals. Whatever the circumstances may be, however, such measures should not be taken at the detriment of the enjoyment of human rights. Mass expulsions of any category of persons, whether on the basis of nationality, religion, ethnic, racial or other considerations "constitute a special violation of human rights". This type of deportations calls into question a whole series of rights recognized and guaranteed in the Charter; such as the right to property (article 14), the right to work (article 15), the right to education (article 17 paragraph 1) and results in the violation by the State of its obligations under article 18 paragraph 1 which stipulates that "the family shall be the natural unit and basis of society. It shall be protected by the State which shall take care of its physical and moral health". By deporting the victims, thus separating some of them from their families, the Defendant State has violated and violates the letter of this text…

The Commission does not wish to call into question nor is it calling into question the right of any State to take legal action against illegal immigrants and deport them to their countries of origin, if the competent courts so decide. It is however of the view that it is unacceptable to deport individuals without giving them the possibility to plead their case before the competent national courts as this is contrary to the spirit and letter of the Charter and international law.[vi]

In a later case, the African Commission stressed the importance of due process and access to legal representation which are, in the current scenario, also of significant importance:

“Time and again, in communication 71/1992, Recontre Africaine pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme v Zambia [(2000) AHRLR 321 (ACHPR 1996)], the African Commission held that the mass expulsions, particularly following arrest and subsequent detentions, deny victims the opportunity to establish the legality of these actions in the courts. In the present case, there is no indication as to whether the deportees were accorded the opportunity to contact their families, much less attorneys, thereby making the requirement of exhausting local remedies impracticable.”[vii]

It further stated:

“The African Commission is of the view that the actions of the respondent state as shown in the preceding paragraphs not only denied fair treatment of the victims with opportunity to challenge their deportation but also failed to allow them opportunity to deal with their belongings. The complainant argues and the African Commission concurs that the type of deportations involved in the present case (ie mass expulsions without due process) challenge a series of rights and protections afforded by the Charter, including the right to property, and, as such, the measures taken by the respondent state in its arrest, detention and subsequent deportation of the victims ‘called into question a whole series of rights recognized and guaranteed in the Charter’, including the right to property. While the right to property under the African Charter is not absolute, the respondent state has not provided evidence to prove that its actions were necessitated either by public need or community interest. Without such a justification and the provision of adequate compensation determined by an impartial tribunal of competent jurisdiction, the African Commission finds the respondent state’s actions in violation of the right to property under article 14 of the African Charter.”[viii]

We further draw the AU’s attention to the resolution of the African Commission in April 2015 condemning the xenophobic attacks in South Africa[ix] and request the African Union to call upon the government of South Africa to:

• i. Protect migrants, refugees and other vulnerable foreign nationals from further attacks, including by increasing impartial and effective police presence in high-risk areas and immediately implementing conflict resolution initiatives in these areas involving the Department of Home Affairs;

• ii. Provide humanitarian and other social assistance to those affected by the xenophobic attacks in the country, including counselling for trauma and access to information on services and on durable solutions for refugees and asylum-seekers;

• iii. Bring perpetrators of violence against foreign nationals to justice. To facilitate such prosecutions the Department of Justice should set up special courts, as was done during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, to deal with all cases of violence against foreign nationals in a bid to ease the burden on the courts. Information on accessing these courts should be widely disseminated;

• iv. Investigate and bring to justice the instigators behind the perpetration of the violence;

• v. Condemn unequivocally comments by persons in positions of authority and influence which may amount to incitement to violence;

• vi. Effectively engage the broadest possible South African public, in order to curb and eradicate xenophobia and xenophobic violence. These messages should be repeated, constantly re-iterated and not only heard after crises moments. They should be accessible, in local languages, should be expressed directly to communities, and should involve local leaders;

• vii. Advise and assist all those who have been victims of violence to seek redress;

• viii. Assist refugees and asylum seekers who have lost their permits to have these re-issued and put in place concrete plans for their reintegration into communities.

As stated above, in 2008, the xenophobic attacks left at least 62 dead, hundreds wounded, and contributed to the displacement of 100,000 people or more. Following those attacks the South African Human RightsCommission (SAHRC) prepared a report with their findings andrecommendations[x]. We call on the AU to remind the South African government of this report and call upon the government and the SAHRC to immediately take steps to implement the recommendations found therein.

In addition, we request you to call upon governments of other countries to ensure steps are taken to prevent reprisals against South African nationals in their territories.

Source: The Maravi Post