Throwback to When Young Customs Officer Launched Campaign Against Drug Trafficking’s

Did You Know? Under the Buhari military regime, there was a death penalty in place for drug traffickers. However, when General Ibrahim Babangida took over in August 1985, one of the first things he did was to delete the death penalty for drug traffickers. Interestingly, there was a decline in the number of arrests particularly following the death of Gloria Okon. Around that period, drug trafficking took another dimension and traffickers started using postal packages across the Benin-Nigerian land border or via outlets in Borno State where they used fast boats to ferry the drugs across Lake Chad.

As at December 1985, Lagos was the hub of drug traffickers. The area administrator of the Customs at the Murtala Mohammed Airport was a young man named Atiku Abubakar and he would always lament how arrested suspects confessed during interrogation that they went into the drug business because they felt the new Babangida government was going to drop the death penalty which was exactly what the smiling general did. IBB said he was doing so on moral grounds.

So, on the 27th of November, 1985, IBB’s second-in-command, a commodore in the navy and Chief of General Staff named Ebitu Ukiwe announced to the world that death penalty for drug pushers had been abolished. Atiku cried out that there was an inherent danger in the steady rise of drug trafficking and was going to lead to a huge embarrassment of Nigeria on the international scene. That was in 1985.

It seems that the ambitious personality & political Figure has always had GOOD INTENTIONS for Nigeria.