Insider threats and drug trafficking at airports

The rate at which drug traffickers and their barons have upped their ante in their attempts to smuggle in and export dangerous drugs through the airports, particularly the Murtala Muhammed Airport, has obviously become a source of worries for the airport community and even Nigeria at large.

In the last month, almost twenty drug peddlers were arrested at the Lagos airport by the officials of the National Drug Law and Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).

Hardly will a day pass without one or two of such drug peddlers being arrested at the airport by the ever-ready officials of the anti-narcotic agency.

Surprisingly, even as the NDLEA keeps arresting and prosecuting them, the drug couriers continue to show resilience in their desperation to focus on the airports through where they want to continue to perpetrate their criminal activities.

While the leadership of the NDLEA should be commended as it continues to declare war on the undesirable elements, the recent increase in the activities of the drug kingpins at the airports calls for deeper reflection by Nigerians, especially the aviation authorities.

The preference for the use of air transport as the major mode chosen by the drug peddlers to perpetrate their crimes may not be far from their belief that using the airports will hasten their evil agenda.

Amidst the activities of these evil elements and while their conducts continue to put Nigeria on the front burner for drug trafficking, many questions are calling for answers, considering how the drug couriers find it easy to penetrate the airport system.

This brings to the fore the critical safety issue of ‘insider threats’ which cannot be ignored if the total war on the desperate drug kingpins must succeed.

The need to focus on the issue of insider threat became more pertinent as it has been discovered that the drug couriers have a wider network of accomplices spreading across the airlines, ground handling companies and many other airport workers.

The latest of such evil alliances was witnessed in the recent arrest of a cleaner at the Lagos airport by the NDLEA operatives for leading a drug syndicate around the airport.

Besides the cleaner, it is on record that some workers working in the warehouses of the ground handling companies had been linked to aiding drug trafficking.

Another example involved a Saudi-bound young female student who escaped being executed because some airport workers in one of the handling companies conspired to plant dangerous drugs in her luggage.

It is a fact that the activities of drug peddlers are made easy through the voluntary connivance of their airport collaborators.

At this point, it has become pertinent for the NDLEA, in conjunction with the aviation authorities, to look deeper into the patriotism of the various stakeholders at the airport particularly those who have access to sensitive points.

In doing this, the different agencies, airlines and other allied companies whose assignments connect to the sterile part of the airport should carry out an in-house background data check on their workers who may have sold their souls to the devil through the monetary and other incentives the drug peddlers may have dangled and still dangling before them to woo the workers to their side.

Without a doubt, the present leadership of the NDLEA and the officials deserve commendations and cooperation from the airport community to make the airports inaccessible to drug trafficking.