The United States has praised Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) for its operational successes, particularly the dismantling of methamphetamine laboratories linked to Mexican cartels, while the agency’s chairman urged Washington to sustain or increase its support.
Michael Gonzales, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) for Africa and the Middle East, made the remarks on Tuesday during a visit to the NDLEA national headquarters in Abuja. He was received by the agency’s Chairman/CEO, Brig: Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa (Rtd), and members of its management team.
Gonzales, who assumed office four months ago, said Nigeria was his first destination because of its status as a continental leader and economic powerhouse, and because of the NDLEA’s leadership and record of success. He said he wanted to see “firsthand where the magic happens.”
He cited the four methamphetamine laboratory busts recorded this year as evidence of best-practice tradecraft, including intelligence-led investigations, cross-agency and cross-border coordination, operational excellence, and thorough interrogation, investigation and prosecution.
According to Gonzales, narcotics affect American communities more tangibly than almost any other foreign policy issue, and the drug trade is international with very few constraints. He said the work of INL and the NDLEA “fundamentally delivers for the Nigerian people, for the American people.”
Gonzales noted that INL’s more than 40 years of partnership with countries worldwide has taken the form, in Nigeria, of training and equipment donations. He said intense US pressure on cartels in the Western Hemisphere was like “squeezing a balloon,” pushing trafficking flows toward Africa and onward to Europe and Oceania. He also pointed to a shift from plant-based drugs to harder-to-detect and deadlier synthetics, and called for sustained action against transnational criminal organisations as a network, including the money flows that facilitate them.
Marwa said the partnership, built through INL’s institutional assistance and the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s cooperation with the NDLEA, is a shared investment in the collective security of both nations.
“Crime has no borders, and neither does the threat,” he said, linking the seizure of drugs and weapons and the tracing of terrorist financing as aspects of a convergence of crime. He argued that drug money buys guns, guns sustain armed groups, and armed groups sustain terrorism, adding that what festers in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin does not stay there.
Marwa detailed the agency’s recent operations against Mexican cartel-linked laboratories. He said NDLEA operatives dismantled the largest clandestine methamphetamine laboratory ever discovered in Nigeria, in a forest in Ijebu East, Ogun State, where three Mexican meth experts and their Nigerian collaborators were arrested and illicit substances worth over $360 million were recovered. About four weeks later, the agency raided another industrial-scale laboratory at Tapa Village in Oyo State, arresting a Mexican methamphetamine expert brought in for large-scale synthesis, along with four Nigerian collaborators. Similar facilities were subsequently dismantled in Enugu State and Ebonyi State, all linked to Mexican cartels.
“These were not isolated incidents. They show a deliberate attempt to turn Nigeria into a manufacturing hub,” Marwa said.
He said the cartels were seeking a West African corridor to ship industrial quantities of methamphetamine to Europe, Asia and American cities, particularly as they look for alternative routes in light of US pressure on cartel traffic en route to America. “Every meth-producing laboratory that we shut down is a supply line that never reaches an American street,” he said, describing the NDLEA’s forensic chemists, investigators and tactical teams as, in effect, “forward defence for communities in the United States.”
Marwa said INL assistance underpins the agency’s capabilities in forensic and chemical analysis, professional training, investigative and financial-crime skills, and equipment maintenance. He said the partnership has fuelled offensives that, in the last five years, led to the arrest of 96,157 drug offenders, including 250 drug barons; the seizure of over 15.8 million kilograms of assorted illicit drugs; and the conviction of 16,691 drug traffickers, including kingpins.
Warning that any withdrawal of INL support would leave a gap that criminal networks and terrorist groups would exploit, Marwa asked Gonzales to carry a message to Washington: that INL support “as is, should be maintained if not increased.” He said traffickers, arms dealers and terrorists cooperate across borders every day, and governments confronting them must do the same.
