OPINION: Narco-Presidencies and How They End

MERCHANTS of psychotropic substances, regardless of the jurisdiction of their operations, do not take prisoners. ‘’Obi fere ha azu’’ as my igbo people would say of deeply evil and heartless people. They are buccaneers of the bare foot. They are merchants of sorrow, veterans of blood sport and dispensers of death. They have usually no room for errors. They leave nothing to chance – because the price for it would be prohibitively expensive. That includes dying with their own lives. Once you are in you are hardly out. No sabbatical. No leave of absence. There’s no retirement. They are a merchant of death and destruction as drug dealers, and behave as they do, because as the Igbo would say ‘’onye na-ebe isi anaghi ekwe ka ewere nma gafe ya na azu’’. The transliteration would go something like this: a person who is into the business of severing heads never allows a person with a sharpened machete behind him.
It is a serious business . Drug business at any level as a lord or baron , or as a courier or scout , or a mole embedded inside government security agencies , or a whistle-blower when law enforcers are planning for a raid . It runs for 24 hours a day and seven days a week . In the chain the baron will not tolerate any weakness. He does not give a second chance to any operative who’s laid back, no matter how lowly in the hierarchy the faltering operative may be. He is not at all bothered by the sight of blood. It wouldn’t matter if the person being ‘’wasted’’ is a blood relation, a sibling or even parents. The drug baron is a mortal enemy of security agents of the state especially those that cannot be compromised . This is because he operates outside of the law .

This is why normal societies avoid any situation that would allow any person with a dubious background to capture political power at any level, certainly not at the highest echelons of statecraft. No state institution would be safe. Not the bureaucracy. Not the magistracy. Not the courts of law. The laws, no. Not the political system. Not the parties. Not the norms and mores of democracy and the greater spectrum of society. Not the economic. Not a single thing. The power is concentrated. And jealously protected. Favours are kept and dispensed personally at the whim and pleasure of the drug lord. The economy is arranged for the service and benefit of one – the lord of the manor.

The man at the top of the pile plunders and expropriates and privatizes the national treasury for the benefit of one and those in his good books at any material time. If you disagree you are never tolerated. Disagreement is considered as a treason that attracts capital punishment carried out by public execution or hanging by the neck until the ‘’traitor’’ dies. If the use of the instruments of coercion and violence of the state proved inconvenient, the baron could resort to the notorious ‘’Italian solution’’ where the offender is disappeared, never to be accounted for, or simply shot at point blank range, and killed on the streets like a dog, and the killers would never be found. That was our reality in this country under military dictatorships — murdering people in broad daylight in public execution style. And they were intended to send a strong message to would be ‘’traitors’’.410

Fear is king in the hearts of citizens ruled by a despot. And despotism in government is not the monopoly of military elements who seized political power. All drug barons are dictators. To run successfully an empire based on the proceeds of psychotropic substances which are mind benders and wasters of generations, an iron fist is a sine qua non. The baron would soon, but not too soon, become a toast without raising fears among his subjects. In any empire or even a country run by a drug lord [remember we said earlier that no drug dealer really retires from that business] everyone is a spy on everyone else. In such places fear is a constant. Fear is usually something you can feel. You do not have to do or say anything wrong for you to be disappeared in such an environment. It should be enough to send you to the place of no return, the mere suspicion of your loyalty or commitment to the cause. Only a benevolent drug lord, and he does not live in this universe, would hesitate to visit upon his survivors the ‘’crimes’’ of the dead member.

If a drug baron gets hold of the highest levers of state power, the country is lost. The moves for state capture tend to be dogged, swift and relentless. No institution in that country would be safe. The judiciary would be compromised, tainted and corrupted. Independent minded judges and sundry officers would be dismissed from their positions and replaced with loyalists and minions. Mansions would be built for judges who will preside over cases involving their benefactors, at one point or the other. In such cases the state conqueror and his confederates would not care about real or perceived bias. In these cases, it would not be unheard of to see judgments by judges with sentences and paragraphs that appear to have been lifted directly from the partisan political stump speeches of a member of the ruling elite and cabal. It is also in such countries that you see courts of coordinate jurisdictions issuing judgments which contradict each other like confeities. One judge makes a ruling on the conduct of a critical and sensitive state institution, another judge jumps up immediately to make a counter ruling to favour the ruling cabal. If it is a liberal democracy, the power brokers would shamelessly blur or even obliterate any semblance of separation of powers. The baron or his enablers would grab the funds of the judiciary and then go ahead to determine the remunerations of judges and sundry judicial officers, determine their promotions, the domestic and foreign courses that they would be permitted to attend and the size of the estacode, the promotion or the stagnation of their spouses who happen to be working in other government institutions.

Like wannabe dictators and dictators in so-called democracies, drug barons seek immortality in many forms. In North Korea, for instance, there are giant and life-size statues of the succession of dictators in every nook and cranny of that country. North Koreans are reminded constantly who is in charge. The present ruler is the grandson of the original ruler. Kim Jong Un has been accused of murdering his own brother in order to consolidate power . He’s said to be grooming his daughter to be his successor. Donald Trump is the president of the United States of America and another wannabe dictator. His banner is in front of the offices of the Department of Justice, which by America’s convention is usually autonomous and independent of the president. Not under Trump who just turned 80 last Sunday. July 4th will mark America’s 250th birthday. Trump has worked very hard to blur the line, and to submerge America’s independence anniversary under the celebration of his own birthday. He is furiously working with his Treasury Secretary who is said to be a man married to another man to make a $250 bill with his image embossed on it. It is to be a commemorative legal tender. The American Constitution prohibits the appearance of the image of a living person on American currency (coins or notes), but this fact does not deter Trump and his sycophantic collaborators. He is facing headwinds from some Americans, the judiciary and parts of Congress. There are not many countries under the spell of would-be dictators that are so lucky.

Another strongman in pursuit of eternity is Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation. It’s what dictators do. Putin is Russia. Russia is Putin. He makes oligarchs. He kills the oligarchs. His enemies regularly die falling out of the windows of 15-storey apartment blocks or hotel rooms. His critics, among them those in exile, are tracked down and poisoned with lethal chemicals. He has imperial ambitions. That is why he has been waging war on Ukraine since 2022. The Russian Duma [parliament] has many things in common with Nigeria’s national assembly, the most important being their lapdog roles for the executive arm of government and the imperial presidencies. It must be noted neither Trump nor Putin are stained of any report of drug dealings.

Perhaps the most notorious person who was dealing drugs while he was president of Panama is Manuel Noriega. In 1983, Panama’s army general, Noriega, took political control of the country. But a year earlier, as head of military intelligence in that country, he had struck a deal with Pablo Escobar’s Medelin Drug Cartel through which he allowed Colombian cocaine shipments to pass freely through Panama’s airport. He pocketed $200,000 for every plane load that came through the country enroute to the US and elsewhere. The cartel also paid him commission of up to $4million a month. By 1989, Noriega was said to be worth some $400million from the drug business. America knew about his dealings but turned a blind eye, because Noriega was a CIA agent who had been on their payroll since the late 1950s. America knows what to do with assets they no longer want, or whose cover has been blown. So an American asset is a double-edged sword. There is an expiry date and the end can be devastating.

By 1985 Noriega had murdered and beheaded a political opponent, Hugo Spadafora, and had become a liability to the United States. Three years later a grand jury in Miami and Tampa indicted him on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling and money laundering. US forces stormed Panama on December 20, 1989 to arrest him, but Noriega escaped and took refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City. That year, Noriega had cancelled the results of the country’s democratic elections. The US surrounded the Vatican embassy and played deafening rock music 24/7 as psychological warfare. On January 3, 1990, Noriega exited the embassy and surrendered his arms. In America he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He served 17 years and was released on good behaviour. He was extradited from a U.S. prison to France, where he was tried and convicted for laundering money through French banks. Noriega died in prison in Panama in 2017 while serving his prison terms including for murdering his political rivals.

Likewise, a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was convicted of connections to drug trafficking. In 2024 he was convicted by a US federal jury of conspiring to import into America more than 400 tons of cocaine between 2004 and 2022, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was pardoned and released by Trump last December. At the beginning of the year, American troops stormed into Caracas and whisked away the previous president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife. The couple is being held in a US prison awaiting trial for allegedly conspiring to traffic cocaine and partnering with drug cartels. Maduro has entered a plea of not guilty. He called the charges against him a means to advance “imperial” designs by Americans to gain access to his country’s vast crude oil reserves. He claimed he was a ‘’kidnapped president’’ and a ‘’prisoner of war’’. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro [Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego] is currently in the US’s crosshairs over concerns with drugs. Since taking office, he has only been sanctioned by the American Treasury Department for allowing the explosion of cocaine production in his country. The ousted president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, was also said to have offered the presidential palace as a safe haven for the drug business of his brother. He was said to have profited from the drug business when sanctions took their toll on the country’s revenues.

The lesson is that those who use presidencies of nations as a shield to deal on drugs and those who had ties with drug cartels before assuming political power do not usually end well. For those who were or still are agents of the CIA and assets of the United States, it is worse. When they fall out of favour or become a liability to that foreign power, their falls are cataclysmic. Let those who have ears hear. And get ready. Because the end is going to come for sure. And it might be unpleasant.