Hon Agbo Decries Poor Funding Of NDLEA

Oru Leonard

The Chairman, House Committee on Narcotics, Francis Agbo of the House of Representatives in Nigeria has raised an alarm over the poor funding of the National Drugs Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA despite its critical role in national development.

Hon Agbo who lamented on the poor funding during the inaugural meeting of the Committee in Abuja assured that the 9th National Assembly would do everything humanly possible to redress the situation.

He noted that the NDLEA established since 1989 and saddled with the responsibility of tracing, arresting and prosecution of drug offenders was still in infancy in all the states of the federation.

He was already working on a bill for the agency’s autonomy revealed that the personnel cost of the agency presently stood at N8 billion which he said took a large chunk of the annual budget of the agency while only about N200m was meant for its operations.

“As at today, such an all-important agency is being underfunded, the agency lives on charity, for the whole, it has only eight sniffer dogs for its operations and the dogs were even donated to the country by the German government.

“It has gotten to such a pathetic situation that its staff deployment is two staff to local government and it has only a vehicle to cover six local governments,” he said.

According to him “While the agency is fighting drug wars with analogue weapons used during the civil war, the traffickers are using modern and sophisticated weapons to boost their illicit trade.

“Most of the multifaceted problems we are facing today as a country such as kidnapping, armed robbery, human trafficking, violent crime of all kinds and what have you, are all side effects of drugs.

“So, as a Nation, nobody will take us seriously on our seriousness in the war against drugs. The youths who are the leaders of tomorrow are now neck-deep in drugs, we must rise against this challenge and arrest the menace to secure the future of our country,” Hon Agbo advised .