The wooden canoes stacked on the putrid beach of Mbour’s main port tell not one story, but two. Once these locally made, satellite-equipped pirogues did a busy trade in shipping out thousands of young men for whom Mbour is the port of choice for the perilous journey to Europe. Now they have begun to export a far more profitable clandestine commodity to Europe’s shores: cocaine.
Negotiating a path between sand-caked piles of gutted fish and robed market women haggling over prices, Abdoulaye Boubacar, a local guide, tells a tale that is increasingly familiar along the palm-fronted coast of the West African tropics.
”The trade in humans has moved down south but now we have people moving drugs instead,” he says. Gesturing at a group of boys busily scavenging for fishing nets that might be worth fixing on the tar-stained sand, he adds: ”If you look at the problems we have here you can see why it can be attractive.”
About 3 210kg of cocaine have been seized off Senegal’s seaboard this year, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The seizures are the country’s largest so far. Last year over a tonne of cocaine was found by police in a single boat in Mbour, a town of 70 000 people. Earlier more than two tonnes were discovered in a safe house outside the capital Dakar, 96km north, destined for the coast.
European donors and local politicians alike worry that Senegal, an oasis of political stability in one of the world’s most politically turbulent regions, is gradually succumbing to cocaine’s lure.
”Cartels active in South America have come to Dakar and set up here,” said Abdoulaye Niang, one of Senegal’s anti-narcotics policemen, to local reporters, pointing to the existence of structured networks of Senegalese, Colombians and Europeans running regional operations.
But Senegal is just one piece in the jigsaw of West African countries that have become a cocaine smugglers’ paradise. Unmonitored coasts, poorly paid officials, porous borders and booming informal markets: to freewheeling drugs cartels it’s an ideal market entry point.
Traffickers initially targeted Guinea-Bissau to the south, but Senegal’s relatively solid roads and good telecommunications infrastructure has seen the traffickers move upwards. Ghana and Guinea-Conakry are other preferred entry points, according to UNODC. Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Guinea-Conakry are favoured conduits for couriers.
The UN estimates around 50 tonnes a year, worth almost $2bn at western European wholesale prices, passes through West Africa. In some cases the value of the trafficked drugs is greater than the country’s national income.
Some cocaine leaves Colombia aboard planes small enough to fly at altitudes of about 2 000m, making them undetectable by radar.
The planes land, often at night, in towns such as Boke in Guinea-Conakry, from where the convoy is transported under escort to the city for storage.
Last month the son of former president Lansana Conté confessed to being involved in drug trafficking on television.
Some byproducts of the cocaine trail are far more obvious than the clandestine shipments themselves. In the nightclubs beloved by Dakar’s nouveau riche, Spanish and Portuguese accents are increasingly heard amidst French and Wolof orders for imported French wine. On the city’s arid outskirts meanwhile, metallic and glass office buildings rise, while apartment blocks punctuate the dramatic Atlantic-facing corniche boulevard.
One local businessman said that whole construction sites were being funded with drug money. ”We’re talking huge housing developments. Senegal is doing well economically but when you see the pace of construction it doesn’t add up. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being smuggled and laundered here,” he said.
The rise in local drug activity only tells part of the story. According to Antonio Mazzitelli, head of West Africa’s regional UNODC office in Dakar, Senegal’s role in the Africa-Europe drug trade can be seen in Europe’s well-policed airports. ”The seizure rate is weak; the real measure of cocaine trafficking is how much is being caught on people bringing it into Europe, that gives a much clearer indication of the scale of the problem we’re facing.”
Senegal has become the largest source country in West Africa, with 434kg caught in 105 separate mule seizures over the past two years. South American drug cartels often pay their Senegalese allies in kind — they get a cut of the cocaine being trafficked. Autonomous Senegalese smuggling units have now sprung up, sometimes taking advantage of the country’s global diaspora of Muslim entrepreneurial networks embedded as street traders in Europe, car dealers in the US or import-export dealers in Hong Kong.
Even European figures represent a fraction of what gets through — mostly to the UK and Spain, often via France. Averaging over 4kg a mule, it’s indicative of the risks some young Senegalese are taking.
Some locals are phlegmatic about the problem. One Dakar-based journalist questioned why Africans should care what Europeans — and increasingly, Arabs in the Gulf — choose to put up their noses. – guardian.co.uk