By Mahmud Isa Yola
On the noon of Saturday, I sat in the cavernous Conference Hall of the National Mosque in Abuja, lost in a sea of faces, listening with keen interest as my boss, the NDLEA’s Director of Media and Advocacy, Mr. Femi Babafemi, connected the dots between insecurity and drug abuse during a Public Lecture organised by Muslim Rights Concern, MURIC.
For those who know the inner workings of the Agency, seeing Mr. Babafemi at a public event on a weekend is as rare as seeing a comet. To him, Saturdays are sacred, not for rest, but for the grim arithmetic of the drug war.
Like the diligent scribe in a relentless chronicle, he dedicates his weekends to collating the details of every arrest and every seizure from commands nationwide, preparing the weekly press release that sets the tone for Monday morning.
He is a man who believes, like the ancient stoics, that “to leave the ledger unbalanced for a day is to invite chaos.” Yet, the gravity of the subject—the bleeding soul of our nation—compelled him to break this ironclad routine.
The atmosphere in the hall, initially ceremonial, turned suffocatingly heavy when Professor Abba Gambo, the Agricultural Adviser to the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF), took the microphone. With a voice laden with personal grief, he recounted how the insurgency had wiped out almost all his siblings. He painted a vivid, horrifying picture of a relative shot dead at close range right in front of him by a young man he initially thought was approaching to exchange pleasantries.
He took us inside the IDP camps, describing mothers so broken by despair that they were begging strangers to take their children, choosing the pain of separation over the agony of watching them starve. He narrated the abomination of a mother raped by her own son after he was radicalised by Boko Haram, and the ultimate horror of a terrorist who “married” both a mother and her daughter, holding them in such depraved captivity that when rescue finally came, both were pregnant for the same man.
Prof. Gambo’s voice trembled as he asked the question that hung over us like a dark cloud: “Would this be possible for a human being—a superior creation of God, endowed with a soul and conscience—to be this cruel, this animalistic, without being under the influence of hard substances?”
The hall fell into a graveyard silence. We thought we had heard the worst of it.
But I cannot think of anything more devastating than realizing that at the exact moment we were shuddering in that hall, another evil was being perpetrated in Kano. While we analyzed the theory of terror in Abuja, the practical reality of it was visiting the home of Haruna Bashir in Dorayi Chiranchi Quarters.
In a senseless orgy of violence, unknown assailants stormed the sanctuary of a family and wiped out a generation.
They killed Haruna’s wife, 35-year-old Fatima Abubakar. But they didn’t stop there. They turned their weapons on the children. Maimuna, 17, on the cusp of womanhood; Aisha, 16; Bashir, 13; Abubakar, 10; Faruk, 7.
And most heart-wrenching of all, they silenced the cries of little Abdussalam, a baby of barely one and a half years old.
As I read the report, tears blurred my vision. What crime could a one-year-old commit? What threat does a nursing mother pose? This was not a robbery; this was an erasure.
While the specific motive for this carnage is still being investigated by the police, one cannot help but return to the chilling truth Mr. Babafemi laid bare at the event: Where there is heinous crime, there is most certainly drugs.
I do not intend to oversimplify this tragedy. God knows this is cruelty of the highest order, and woe betide the monsters who did this. But we must not ignore the facts. The vast majority of homicides, cold-blooded family massacres, and acts of extreme depravity are committed by individuals whose minds have been hijacked by psychoactive substances. A normal human mind has a brake—a conscience that screams “stop” when it tries to take a life. It takes a chemical agent to cut that brake.
Yet, as a society, we are not fully awake to this epidemic. We treat drug abuse as a distant moral failing rather than the immediate existential threat it is.
The NDLEA, under the leadership of Brig. Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa (Retd), has created a toll-free helpline (0800 1020 3040) specifically to support drug users and their families, offering a path to treatment before they become monsters or victims.
But how many people call this line? The Chairman has tirelessly advocated for drug integrity tests—in our homes, our schools, and our workplaces—to fish out drug use early and treat it. Yet, we hesitate. We worry about “privacy” and “stigma” while the drugs take control of souls. We allow the addiction to fester, and when the addicts eventually explode and wreck the greatest havoc, we curse and wail.
The link is undeniable. Statistics from the NDLEA’s vaults prove that terrorism and violent crime thrive on the abuse of drugs by insurgents. In the last five years, the Agency has intercepted more drugs destined for terrorists than ever before.
We remember September 2021, when operatives at the Apapa port seized 451,807 tablets of Captagon weighing 74.119kg. This was not for street peddlers. Captagon is known globally as the “Jihadist Drug”, the very pill used by ISIS fighters in Syria to stay awake for days and kill without remorse.
These pills were destined for the insurgents in the North East, intended to fuel the exact kind of madness Prof. Gambo described. We remember the millions of Tramadol pills intercepted from syndicates supplying bandit camps. These are the logistical supplies of terror.
The slaughter in Kano is a sorrow too deep for words. But as we mourn Fatima and her six beautiful children, we must realise that we are not just fighting criminals; we are fighting the substances that turn men into beasts. Until we confront the drug scourge with the same intensity we confront the bandits, we will continue to weep.
May the souls of the innocent rest in peace, and may we, the living, finally wake up.
Mahmud Isa Yola Writes from NDLEA NHQ Abuja.
