The Chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) Buba Marwa, says the agency needs more sniffer dogs to tackle drug trafficking and the cartels responsible.
Mr Marwa said a sniffer dog costs as much as $20,000. He, however, refused to disclose the number of sniffer dogs in the possession of the agency.
The former army brigadier disclosed this Thursday when he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Narcotics to defend his budget.
The Chairman of the Committee, Francis Agbo (PDP, Benue), had said that he discovered that the agency has no sniffer dog at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja.
Responding to the comment, Mr Marwa said they have dogs but he will not disclose the number of dogs in order not to reveal its operational capacity to cartels.
He disclosed that the German government recently donated some dogs to the agency and is building a six million Euro dog training school in Lagos for West African countries.
“We definitely need dogs. Dogs cost between $15,000 and $20,000 each. I won’t state in this forum to the hearing of the cartels how many dogs we have. We need more dogs. I will take the opportunity to express appreciation to the German criminal police — we work with them. On the dogs, they supply the dogs.
“They just supplied a few. More importantly, they are building a six million euro dog training school in Lagos which would be used also with our neighbours in ECOWAS,” he said.
Mr Marwa said the agency is working on getting more dogs for the Abuja airport. He, however, added that the scanner at the airport is efficient enough to prevent drugs from passing through.
“In Abuja, we are working on the dogs, but drugs do not pass because we have scanners,” he said.
Mr Marwa also informed the lawmakers that the agency has, in less than 20 months, seized 5.4 million kilogrammes of drugs which have a street value of N420 billion.
He said the agency has secured 3,111 convictions from 19,341 arrests with 3,232 suspects still in court.
He stated that the agency is proposing a N40 billion budget. About N18.6 billion is for recurrent expenditure while N21.4 billion is for capital expenditure.
Mr Marwa, therefore, appealed to the lawmakers to increase the N13 billion proposed for the completion of barracks to house NDLEA officials. He requested an additional N10 billion.
The chairman of the committee assured him that the committee will recommend an increment of the budget to ensure that officers get befitting barracks.
