25112020 - Selfish Northerners opposing restructuring, says el-Rufai

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18 — Vanguard, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2020
THE coronavirus pandemic has
contributed a lot to the current food
inflation ravaging Nigerian families.
Coming in February/March, the
beginning of the planting season, and
forcing a prolonged national
lockdown, it prevented many of our
farmers from sowing their seeds.
Food inflation, according to the
National Bureau of Statistics, NBS,
rose from 16.66 per cent to 17.38 per
cent in September this year and
getting worse as the year draws to a
close.
General inflation in the economy
stands at 14.33 per cent. The prices of
staple food items such as yam, garri,
pepper, onions, rice, tomatoes and
others have gone sky high at a time
when the incomes of average families
have dwindled or run out altogether
due to layoffs and pay cuts.
It promises to be a very bleak
Yuletide festive period.
The situation we face could have
been much more manageable if the
Solving insecurity, ending food inflation
President Muhammadu Buhari
administration had made good its
campaign promise of solving our
security problem which is part of the
regime’s three-point agenda:
economy, security and anticorruption.
Indeed, the security situation has
worsened under the watch of this
regime due mainly to poor
management and the kid gloves with
which it has treated aspects of our
insecurity.
Though the Federal Government
often beat its chest that it has dislodged
Boko Haram jihadists from their
captured territories, the terrorists have
multiplied beyond Boko Haram, with
the Islamic State in West Africa
Province, ISWAP, now equally
formidable.
The foreign bandits that some evil
politicians had brought to fight their
turf wars have now turned their guns
on residents of states in the North
West and North Central, particularly
Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna Niger and
parts of Kogi.
Also, armed Fulani militias from all
parts of Africa masquerading as
herdsmen have flooded the forests and
farmlands of states in the Middle Belt
and South, killing and kidnapping for
ransom, robbing, destroying
farmlands with their cattle and forcibly
settling on people’s lands.
Curiously, the herdsmen militias are
the only terrorist groups that
government has refused to tag the
terrorists that they are. It has also
refrained from deploying the army to
flush them out of our bushes.
All these agents of insecurity
marauding all over Nigeria have
succeeded in displacing farming
communities and making farming
unsafe.
Farmers are afraid to engage in their
legitimate occupation. With the
closure of the borders and restrictions
on food importation, it is not
surprising that Nigeria is on the verge
of famine.
If the Federal Government is
unwilling to get rid of the armed
herdsmen, then it should allow each
community to deal with them and
allow farmers back to work. Without
solving our insecurity problems there
are simply no other ways out of this
problem.
Drug use – the forgotten epidemic
By M. BUBA MARWA & OLIVER
STOLPE
IN 2018, the National Bureau of
Statistics, NBS, in cooperation with the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
and the European Union conducted the first
ever national drug use survey in the country.
With a drug use prevalence of more than 14.4
per cent among Nigerians aged between 15
and 64 years - almost three times the global
average of 5.5 per cent - the findings were truly
preoccupying. Then, a total of 14.3 million
Nigerian adults had used illicit drugs or had
made non-medical use of prescription drugs,
primarily pharmaceutical opioids, during the
preceding 12 months. The survey found a total
of almost three million persons suffering from
some form of drug use disorder - dwarfing the
statistics of illnesses, such as HIV/AIDS and
more recently COVID-19. Drug use disorder
is a multi-dimensional health and social
problem. It severely affects the general health
of users, making them significantly more
susceptible to contract and pass on other
illnesses, such as Hepatitis, HIV/AIDS and
Tuberculosis.
Drug use in Nigeria has some particularities.
While the most used drug - like in many other
countries - is Cannabis, the use of Cocaine and
Heroin is comparatively rare. The most
dangerous widespread drug use is the nonmedical
consumption of Tramadol and similar
pharmaceutical opioids, normally used in
clinical pain management. As a matter of fact,
West Africa is presently facing its very own
opioid crisis of proportions similar to the one
experienced in North America.
Since 2018, the situation may very well have
further deteriorated. In a poll conducted by
UNODC and UNICEF in June 2020 among
80,000 Nigerian youths, the majority felt that
drug use had increased in the wake of COVID-
19 related lockdowns, school-closures, and the
economic downturn. ENACT, a research
programme funded by the European Union,
predicts that the number of people who use
drugs in Sub-Saharan Africa will increase
approximately 2.5 fold by 2050, with the lion’s
share in West Africa. For Nigeria, this
projection signifies that it might have to grapple
with more than 35 million drug users.
The Nigerian Government has recognised
What is needed is an urgent
investment into the health and
wellbeing of people if we want to
prevent millions of Nigerians
from falling prey to drugs
the urgency of the situation. In December 2018,
President Buhari established the Presidential
Advisory Committee for the Elimination of
Drug Abuse, PACEDA. The Committee
conducted indepth inquiries into the nature of
drug use and the drug markets in the country
as well as of the dedicated law enforcement,
prevention and treatment capabilities. The
final report was submitted to Mr. President in
October 2019. While follow-up action has been
delayed due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and
the ensuing economic crisis, government has
been working on a new edition of the National
Drug Control Master Plan 2021-2025.
While waiting for government’s next step, it
OPINION
appears worthwhile to reflect on how we got to
where we are. How did Nigeria, which
considered itself for many years primarily a
transit country, become one of the primary
drug consumers worldwide? The answer, to a
large extent, is already implied in the question.
Drug use, for long, was ignored. It was
considered a vice of the West. Local
consumption primarily affected the less
wealthy in society. Also, the spill-over effect
expected to be caused by Nigeria’s role as a
transit hub in the international cocaine trade
did not materialise to the extent feared. Selfmedication,
a lack of access to appropriate
pain medication and a largely un- or
underregulated market for prescription drugs
are likely to have fuelled the widespread use of
pharmaceutical drugs for non-medical
purposes.
With the very first national representative
study on drug use conducted only in 2018, drug
use could have festered and spread for decades
essentially unobserved by policy makers. The
response to drugs in Nigeria, also due to
international pressures, focused for decades
on supply reduction through law enforcement.
The primary objective was to stop the flow of
drugs being trafficked by Latin American
cartels and Nigerian organised crime groups
from South America through West Africa to
Europe. Moreover, drug use was - and by many
still is - considered a personal moral failure
rather than a health issue.
Going forward, what is needed is an urgent
investment into the health and wellbeing of
people, including future generations,if we want
to prevent millions of Nigerians from falling
prey to drugs. Drawing on the successful pilot
testing of unplugged - an evidence-based drug
prevention programme for secondary school
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children - PACEDA recommended to roll it out
to all public and private schools in the country.
We also need to expand the network of
community based drug drop-in centres to drive
drug education and prevention at the
grassroots, provide counselling and after-care
services to drug users and their families, and
to refer cases that require medical treatment
to specialised facilities. We further must
improve regulated access to prescription drugs
for those in need, while curbing unregulated
drug markets.
There is also an urgent need to improve
treatment services for drug users. UNODC
estimates that there are barely 1,000 drug
treatment places in the country. Considering
the three million Nigerians living with a drug
use disorder and approximately 350,000 highrisk
drug users, this is obviously inadequate
and affects in particular female drug users who
face much greater challenges in accessing such
services.
This health and people-centred approach
should be complemented by “smart”
enforcement which focuses on intelligence-led
operations targeting the organisers of the
billion naira drug trade. In short, while the
country’s response to drug use may come late,
it is not too late. Building on its successes in
responding to COVID-19, government has a
unique opportunity to tackle the raging drug
epidemic by acting on the PACEDA report with
the same zeal and sense of purpose.
•Brigadier-General Buba Marwa, OFR, is
Chairman of the Presidential Advisory
Committee on the Elimination of Drug
Abuse, PACEDA, and Oliver Stolpe is Country
Representative, United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime, UNODC, Nigeria