MERCHANTS of psychotropic substances, the jurisdiction of their operations notwithstanding, do not take prisoners. ‘’Obi fere ha azu’’ as my Igbo people would say of thoroughly wicked and unfeeling persons. They are bare-foot buccaneers. They are merchants of sorrow, blood sport veterans and dispensers of death. For them there is usually no room for errors. They do not leave anything to chance because the price for it would be prohibitively costly, including paying with their own lives. Once you are in, you are hardly out. There’s no sabbatical. There’s no leave of absence. There’s no retirement. The reason for being a merchant of death and destruction as a drug dealer, and behaving as they do, is because as the Igbo would say ‘’onye na-ebe isi anaghi ekwe ka ewere nma gafe ya na azu’’. The transliteration would read something like this: a person who is into the business of severing heads never allows anyone else with a sharpened machete behind him.
Drug business at any level as a lord or baron, a courier, a scout, a mole embedded inside government security agencies, or a whistle-blower when law enforcers are planning for a raid, is a serious business that runs for 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The baron does not tolerate any weakness in the chain. He does not allow a second chance for any operative who’s laid back, no matter how lowly in the hierarchy the faltering operative might be. The sight of blood means absolutely nothing to him. It would not matter if the person being ‘’wasted’’ is a blood relation, a sibling or even parents. Because the drug baron operates outside of the law, he is a mortal enemy of security agents of the state, especially those that cannot be compromised.
This explains why normal societies avoid any situation that would allow any person with a dubious background to capture political power at any level and certainly not at the highest echelons of statecraft. No institution of the state would be safe. Not the bureaucracy. Not the magistracy [judiciary]. Not the law courts. Not the laws. Not the political system. Not the political parties. Not the norms and mores of democracy and the wider spectrum of the society. Not the economy. Not anything, really. Power is centralised. And jealously guarded. Favours are warehoused and personally dispensed at the whim and pleasure of the drug lord. The economy is structured for the service and benefit of one – the lord of the manor.
The national treasury is appropriated and expropriated and privatised by the man sitting atop the pile – for the benefit of one, and those in his good books at any material time. Contrary views are never tolerated. Disagreement is treated as a treason that attracts capital punishment implemented by public execution or hanging by the neck until the ‘’traitor’’ dies. If the deployment of the instruments of coercion and violence of the state would prove inconvenient, the baron could resort to the notorious ‘’Italian solution’’ where the offender is disappeared, never to be accounted for, or simply shot at point blank range, and killed on the streets like a dog, and the killers would never be found. The murder, execution style, in public, even in broad daylight was our lived reality in this country under military dictatorships. And they were designed to send a strong message to would-be ‘’traitors’’.
Fear rules in the hearts of citizens ruled by a despot. And despotism in rulership is not the preserve of military elements who seized political power. Every drug baron is a dictator. Iron fist is a sine qua non to successfully run an empire sustained by the proceeds of psychotropic substances which are mind benders and wasters of generations. Without instilling fears among his subjects, the baron would sooner than later become a toast. In any empire or even a country run by a drug lord [recall that we said earlier that no drug dealer really retires from that business], everybody is a spy on everybody else. Fear is a constant in such places. Fear is usually palpable. In such an environment you do not need to do or say anything wrong for you to be disappeared. Mere suspicion of your loyalty or commitment to the cause should be enough to dispatch you to the place of no return. Only a benevolent drug lord, and he does not live in this universe, would hesitate to visit the ‘’crimes’’ of the dead member on his survivors.
If a drug baron captures state power at the highest levers, the country is damned. The moves for state capture are usually dogged, swift and relentless. No institution of that country would be spared. The judiciary would be compromised, contaminated and corrupted. Independent-minded judges and sundry officers would be sacked from their positions and replaced with loyalists and minions. Mansions would be built for judges who will, at one point or the other, preside over cases involving their benefactors. The state conqueror and his accomplices would not be bothered about real or perceived bias in such circumstances. In such situations it would not be unusual to read judgments from judges with sentences and paragraphs that appear to have been lifted straight from the partisan political stomps of a member of the ruling elite and cabal. It’s also in such countries that you see courts of coordinate jurisdictions handing down conflicting judgments like confeities. One judge gives a ruling concerning the conduct of a critical and sensitive state institution, another judge springs up immediately to make a counter ruling to benefit the ruling cabal. The power brokers would brazenly blur or even erase any semblance of separation of powers if it is a liberal democracy. The baron or his enablers would seize the funds of the judiciary and then proceed to determine the remunerations of judges and sundry judicial officers, determine their promotions, the domestic and foreign courses they would be permitted to attend and the size of the estacode, the promotion or the stagnation of their spouses who happen to be working in other government institutions.
Like aspiring dictators and real dictators in so-called democracies, drug barons pursue immortality through various forms. For example in North Korea, that country’s succession of dictators have their giant and life-size statues in every nook and cranny of that country. North Koreans are constantly reminded about who is in charge. The present ruler is the grandson of the founding ruler. Kim Jong Un has been accused of killing his own brother just to consolidate power. He’s said to be preparing his daughter to succeed him. Another wannabe dictator is President Donald Trump of the United States of America. He has his banner in front of the offices of the Department of Justice which by America’s convention is usually autonomous and independent of the president. Not under Trump who turned 80 last Sunday. America will be 250 on July 4. Trump has worked very hard to blur the line, and to subsume America’s independence anniversary under the celebration of his personal birthday. He is working furiously with his Treasury Secretary who is said to be a man married to another man to create a $250 bill with his image embossed on it. It’s planned to be a commemorative legal tender. Trump and his fawning collaborators are not deterred by the fact that the American Constitution forbids the appearance of the image of a living person on American currency, whether coins or notes. He is battling headwinds from some Americans, the judiciary and parts of the Congress. Not many countries under the spell of wannabe dictators are this fortunate.
Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation is another strongman in pursuit of eternity. It is the way of dictators. Putin is Russia. Russia is Putin. He creates oligarchs. He kills oligarchs. His enemies routinely fall off the windows of 15-storey apartment buildings or hotel rooms to their deaths. His critics, including those living in exile, are hunted down and poisoned with deadly chemicals. He has imperial ambitions which explains why he has been levying war on Ukraine since 2022. The Russian Duma [parliament] shares many things in common with Nigeria’s national assembly, the most important being their lapdog roles for the executive arm of government and the imperial presidencies. It has to be noted that neither Trump nor Putin are tainted with any report of drug dealings.
Manuel Noriega is perhaps the most notorious person who was dealing drugs while he was the president of Panama. In 1983, Noriega, an army general took political control of Panama. But a year earlier, as that country’s head of military intelligence, he had struck a deal with Pablo Escobar’s Medelin Drug Cartel through which he allowed Colombian cocaine shipments to pass freely through Panama’s airport. He pocketed $200,000 for every plane load that passed through the country enroute to the US and other destinations. The cartel also paid him a monthly commission of up to $4million. By 1989, Noriega was reported to be worth about $400million from the drug business. America knew about his dealings but looked the other way because Noriega was a CIA agent who had been on their payroll since the late 1950s. America knows how to deal with their assets when they consider such assets no longer useful or that their cover had been blown. So being an American asset is a double-edged sword. It has an expiry date and the end can be catastrophic.
In 1985 Noriega murdered and beheaded a political opponent Hugo Spadafora and became a liability to the US. Three years later he was indicted by a grand jury in Miami and Tampa on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling and money laundering. US forces stormed Panama on December 20, 1989 to effect his arrest but Noriega escaped and took refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City. That same year Noriega had annulled the results of the country’s democratic elections. US troops surrounded the Vatican embassy and blasted deafening rock music 24/7 as a psychological warfare. Noriega crept out of the embassy and surrendered on January 3, 1990. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison in America. He served 17 years and was released for good conduct. From the US prison he was extradited to France where he was tried and convicted for using French banks launder money. Noriega died in prison in Panama in 2017 while serving his prison terms including those of murdering his political rivals.
In like manner, a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was convicted for having ties to narcotics trafficking. He was convicted by a US federal jury in 2024 for conspiring to import into America more than 400 tons of cocaine between 2004 and 2022, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was pardoned and freed by Trump in December last year. Early this year, the erstwhile president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro was plucked from Caracas, along with his wife, by American troops. The couple are in US prison awaiting trial for allegedly engaging in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy and for partnering with drug cartels. Maduro had pleaded not guilty. He described the charges against him as a tool to further ‘’imperial’’ plans by Americans to get access to his country’s enormous crude oil reserves. He said he was a ‘’kidnapped president’’ and a ‘’prisoner of war’’. The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro [Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego] is presently in the crosshairs of the US over concerns with drugs. For now he has only been sanctioned by the American Treasury Department for closing his eyes to the explosion of cocaine production in his country since he assumed office. Ousted president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, was also alleged to have provided the presidential palace as a safe haven for the drug business of his brother. He was said to have benefitted from the proceeds of the drug business when sanctions took a toll on the country’s revenues.
The lesson is that those who use the presidencies of nations as a shield to deal on drugs and those who have had ties with drug cartels before assuming political power do not usually end well. It’s worse for those who were or still are agents of the CIA and assets of the United States. Their falls are cataclysmic when they fall out of favour or become a liability to that foreign power. Those who have ears will do well to listen. And prepare. Because the end will surely come. And it could be unpleasant.
AUTHOR: UGO ONUOHA
Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.
(Ripples)
