…Kano Records 1,422 Arrests, Secured Only 147 Convictions
…580,000kg Of Codeine Seized At Seaports Yields No Conviction
…North-West Tops Arrests, Ranks Last In Drug Seizures
…NDLEA Attributes Arrest-Conviction Disparities To Court Backlogs
The NDLEA’s own annual report tells three stories at once. Who got arrested, what got seized, and actually went to prison.
Somewhere in Kano, there is a man who was arrested by the NDLEA in 2025. We do not know his name. We do not know if he was carrying cannabis in a polythene bag or tramadol pills in his babanriga pocket. What we know, from the NDLEA’s own annual report, is that he was one of 1,422 people the Kano command arrested last year. We also know that only 147 of those 1,422 arrests became convictions.
If you do the math, it will translate to one conviction for every ten arrests. Nine out of ten people Kano’s NDLEA arrested in 2025 did not end up in prison. Some are in court, others had their cases struck out, the rest maybe in a grey zone the report does not explain. But they were not convicted.
But Zamfara command, the next-door neighbour to Kano in the same North-West zonehad fifty-three convictions out of fifty-four arrests in the same 2025. That is a 98.1 percent success rate. Every single person Zamfara arrested, almost without exception, was somebody the evidence could actually put in a dock and keep there.
Same zone, same region, same drug war, but two completely different realities.
That gap, between Kano’s 10 percent and Zamfara’s 98 percent, is the story that the NDLEA’s 2025 Annual Report tells when you read all three of its report data together. Not just the arrests, nor just the seizures, but all three. Because they do not tell the same storyand the distance between them is where Nigeria’s drug war is actually being won and lost.
Arrests share vs seizures share vs convictions share by geopolitical zone. Source: NDLEA 2025 Annual Report. Analysis: The Whistler.
Every year, when the NDLEA releases its numbers, the headline is arrests. And the 2025 numbers are genuinely impressive on that count. Nineteen thousand, nine hundred and forty-four people arrested across 36 states and the FCT. The North-West zone led the country with 4,515 arrests. Kano alone contributed 1,422, the highest single state total in the country. Katsina added 1,011. Kaduna, 1,071.
When you read only the arrest data and you would conclude the North-West is the frontline of Nigeria’s drug war, until you take a look at the drug seizure records, you will notice the trend
The North-West zone, with its 4,515 arrests, seized a combined 24,714.57 kilograms of drugs in 2025. That is 0.51 percent of all drugs seized nationally. The North-Central zone, which made 3,840 arrests, fewer than the North-West, seized 2,313,399 kilograms. The South-South, with 3,224 arrests, seized 1,422,560 kilograms. The zone making the most arrests was producing less than one percent of the drugs being pulled off the streets.
Then read the conviction records:
Kano: 1,422 arrests, 147 convictions, 10.3 percent. Katsina: 1,011 arrests, 92 convictions, 9.1 percent. Plateau: 1,245 arrests, 75 convictions, 6.0 percent. The three biggest arrest states in the North-West and North-Central combined are converting fewer than one in ten arrests into a sentence.
Now look at Zamfara again. Fifty-four arrests. Fifty-three convictions. Niger State: 122 arrests, 121 convictions, a rate of 99.2 percent. Anambra: 461 arrests, 176 convictions, 38.2 percent. Abia: 379 arrests, 152 convictions, 40.1 percent.
The states making the fewest arrests are winning the most in court. The states making the most arrests are losing nine times out of ten. That is not a coincidence. That is a patternand it has a name. It is the difference between arresting to count and arresting to convict.
The Kwara Number That Rewrites The Seizure Records
There is a number buried in the NDLEA 2025 seizure records that will stop you if you are reading carefully. You will reach Kwara State, run your eye across the columns, and then read it again to make sure.
Kwara State Command. Cannabis seized: 2,089,980.06 kilograms. Two million, eighty-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty kilograms. In one state. In one year.
The entire North-West zone, seven states, 4,515 arrests, seized 24,714 kilograms total. Kwara alone, with 842 arrests, seized 84 times more than the whole North-West put together.
The explanation maybe possibly cannabis farm destructions. The forests in Kwara have for years hosted some of the most productive cannabis cultivation in Nigeria. The NDLEA’s Kwara command may have spent 2025 going after the farms themselves, not the street dealers or the marijuana smokers.
Kwara is not alone in this haul. Cross River: 401 arrests, 441,824 kilograms seized, almost entirely from cannabis farms destroyed in its forests. Taraba: 406 arrests, 270,906 kilograms. Ondo: 336 arrests, 228,863 kilograms. Edo: 462 arrests, 202,822 kilograms.
These are not seizures from street dealers. These are agricultural operations. Farms. Hectares. Decades of cultivation gone in a single NDLEA sweep. And the states running these operations are doing it with relatively small arrest counts, because you do not need to arrest a thousand people to destroy a cannabis plantation. You need a team, a truck, and a lighter.
The farm destruction model raises a critical accountability question for the Agency. Does destroying a farm translate into fewer drugs on the street, or does cultivation simply shift location? Can the NDLEA show its operational assessment report which indicates that farm destructions in Kwara, Cross River, Ondo, and Taraba have reduced street availability in consuming states?
From the NDLEA’s report, it is apparent that the drug war in the South-West and parts of the South-South is a supply disruption operation. The drug war in the North-West is a street arrest operation. Both are counting their results in the same national total. They are not the same thing.
Arrest share vs seizure share by geopolitical zone. Source: NDLEA 2025 Annual Report.
What The Seaport Data Says About Nigeria’s Opioid Crisis
Before we go any further, the Port Harcourt Seaport Command needs its own paragraph.
In 2025, the NDLEA’s Port Harcourt Seaport Command seized 410,553.61 kilograms of drugs, 400,718 kg of that were codeine. Four hundred tonnes of codeine, sitting in a container at a Nigerian port, intercepted by the agency’s seaport team. The number of people arrested in connection with it: one.
The number of people charged in court: zero. The number of convictions: zero. The number of pending cases: zero.
Apapa Seaport Lagos: four arrests, 151,694 kilograms of codeine seized, zero prosecutions filed. Tincan Seaport Lagos: 14 arrests, 27,567 kilograms of codeine seized, zero convictions.
Three seaport commands. Nineteen arrests. A combined 580,000 kilograms of codeine intercepted. Not a single case before a judge.
The codeine in those containers did not manufacture itself. It arrived in ships from India or China, declared as something else, loaded by somebody who arranged the shipment, cleared by a network that knew the cargo. One arrest and no prosecution raises questions about whether the investigation progressed beyond interception.
Where was that codeine going? The opioid data from consuming states gives you a partial answer. Imo State seized 69,295 kilograms of tramadol with 376 arrests. Enugu seized 77,116 kilograms of codeine with 586 arrests. Abuja’s NAIA Command seized 6,182 kilograms of tramadol and arrested nobody. The drug moves from the port to the distribution hub to the consumer. The NDLEA is catching it at both ends. The middle remains largely untouched by anything in this 2025 report.
South East: Fewest Arrests, Best Conviction Rate
If you only read the arrest record of Agency’s report, the South-East looks like the quietest zone in the country. Two thousand, two hundred and seventy-six arrests. Lowest of any zone. The obvious conclusion is that the South-East has less drug activity than everywhere else.
The conviction record says something different.
Anambra: 38.2 percent conviction rate. Abia: 40.1 percent. Enugu: 19.8 percent. The South-East zone collectively converted 21.5 percent of its arrests into convictions, the highest zonal rate in the country.
Read that alongside the meth data and the picture gets more interesting. Across the five South-East states combined, the total methamphetamine seized in 2025 was just under five kilograms. Five kilograms across five states, in a zone where mkpuru mmiri is documented as a community-level crisis. Meanwhile, Ondo State alone seized 134.99 kilograms of meth and Osun seized 100.77 kilograms.
The meth is being seized in the South-West, where it is produced. It is not being seized in the South-East, where it is consumed. That five-kilogram figure across the entire South-East is either a measurement of how well the drug’s distribution network hides itself, or a measurement of how few NDLEA resources are tracking the supply chain to its end users. Possibly both.
What Anambra and Abia’s conviction rates tell you is that when the South-East NDLEA commands do make arrests, they make arrests that stick. The question for those commanders is why they are making so few of them.
WHAT THE REPORT DOES NOT SAY
Of 19,944 people arrested, 3,531 were formally charged in court. 3,655 were convicted in 2025, which includes some cases from prior years. 3,345 cases remain pending. 67 were struck out. 20 were acquitted or discharged. That accounts for roughly 10,618 outcomes. The remaining 9,326 arrested people exist in a space the annual report does not map.
Some are under investigation. Some had their cases filed after the reporting period. Some were processed through administrative channels rather than prosecution. The report does not say. That silence is itself a data point.
What the report does say, very clearly, is that arresting more people is not the same as winning a drug war. It is not even the same as putting more people in prison. The states winning in court are the ones that arrested carefully. The states with the highest arrest figures recorded substantially lower conviction rates, raising questions about investigative quality, prosecutorial capacity or case progression. Nigeria spends considerable resources on NDLEA operations.
Brig. Gen. Marwa’s team did real work in 2025. The seizures are real. The arrests are real. The 3,655 convictions are real. But so is Bayelsa’s 1.3 percent. So, is the one person arrested for 400,000 kilograms of codeine with zero cases filed. So is the man in Kano who was one of 1,275 arrests that did not end in conviction last year.
NDLEA’s Response
Speaking to The Whistler on some of the issues raised in this investigative report, the spokesperson of NDELA, Mr. Femi Babafemi, stated that there could be quite a number of variables responsible for the wide disparity in the conviction rate in Kano and Zamfara states.
“First, the 53 convictions recorded in Zamfara could be based on ongoing carryover casesbefore 2025. So, the convictions recorded within that year are not necessarily tied to the arrests made that year.
“So, there could be convictions recorded based on cases started three years earlier, four years earlier, or five years earlier.
“Then, another variable is the number of cases in Zamfara. It’s not the same number of cases that the judiciary in Kano will attend to.
“Don’t forget, our cases are only tried in the federal high court. So, the number of cases the federal high court in Kano will attend to, Zamfara may not have the opportunity of having that kind of number. Meaning that there could be fewer number of judges to attend to our cases in Kano as against what happened in Zamfara. These are variables outside our control”
Reacting to how the Agency could seize over 400 tonnes of codeine at the Port Harcourt port with just one arrest and no prosecution.
“You know, our own work is continuous, even if it takes 10 years we will apprehend the culprits. Once these people sense we are onto their shipment, nobody will come forward to claim the shipments, including the agent. And if you check all of those names on those documents or the addresses, they are all fake. They are nonexistent.
“So, what we do is to now work back to our counterparts in India to track the culprits, because they are not shipped as drugs. They are shipped under the cover of tiles, toiletsmaterials and all of those things.”
Responding to why the north-west recorded the highest number of arrests but accounted for only a tiny share of total drugs seized nationally, Babafemi explained that:
“The north generally is a consumption base. Most of these things are moved from the south to the north. So, most of the people you see are users, only few are into trafficking, as against where they are produced or shipped from.
“In the north, they are the street dealers that carry one gram, two grams, all those kinds of things. So, that’s why you see there is a high record of arrest in the North.”
Asked why their report suggests relatively little methamphetamine was seized in the South-East despite widespread concern over its consumption. Does this indicate that enforcement is not reaching distribution networks effectively:
“Meth is largely abused in the southeast. That’s why it has a special name there, they call it mkpuru mmiri. I think we’ve dismantled the highest number of meth labs in the southeast and in the southwest so far.
“For us, when we make arrests, that’s not enough. It’s just taking the individuals out of circulation temporarily. But when we make seizures, seizures again deny access and availability of these illicit substances, which is a goal for us. The ultimate goal of any arrests is the conviction. Because arrests are to temporarily take the person out of circulation while conviction takes the individual, the convict, out of circulation for a long time. That makes impact, that has deterrence.”
The NDLEA’s explanations provide important context for interpreting the figures. They also highlight a limitation in the agency’s annual reporting. Because convictions recorded in a given year may relate to arrests made several years earlier, the report does not allow a direct year-by-year comparison between arrests and convictions. Even so, the disparities across states in arrests, seizures and convictions remain striking and raise broader questions about how the agency measures operational success.
(The Whistler)