NIGERIAN dealers dominate the cocaine trade which has exploded in South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994, according to a report by the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies.
“Cocaine and crack cocaine were not commonly available in South Africa (prior to 1994) … This market vacuum was filled when Nigerian nationals arrived in Johannesburg just as democracy was dawning,” it says.
The report was released as the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) holds a conference in Ivory Coast on drug trafficking networks throughout Africa.
“This conference is very significant for our country … desperate and unemployed South Africans are being lured by international syndicates with promises of easy money into becoming couriers,” said South Africa’s representative, Social Development Minister Zola Skweyiya, before her departure.
The report says the Nigerians settled next door to prostitutes, who were central to the demand for crack cocaine and its distribution.
“Nigerian nationals had long been involved in the transnational trade in cocaine and heroin and … addicted sex workers would much rather smoke drugs with their clients than have sex with them, and so have a strong incentive to spread the drug,” it says.
South Africa’s first arrest for crack cocaine in 1995 was a decade after the drug’s peak in the United States.
But by 2001 some eight to 10% of addicts admitted to treatment centres in South Africa were using cocaine, said researcher Andreas Pluddemann.
One reason for the Nigerian dealers’ success, the report says, is that they do not consume their own drugs. In general, the Nigerians are not as violent as local dealers, it adds.
The report’s editor, Ted Leggett, said that the Nigerian dealers organised themselves in residential hotels in Hillbrow, a seedy and dangerous inner-city neighbourhood of run-down apartment buildings in Johannesburg.
While this organisation could imply a syndicate structure, it is an organic network where the removal of a “top man” is futile, he said, calling instead for the closure or seizure of the buildings.
The report also advocates the decriminalisation of prostitution as “another way of removing power from the drug lords”.
At the moment emaciated prostitutes, trawling for their next fix, haunt the bars and corridors of these dingy hotels.
The research, which included urine tests of 2,859 arrestees (80% of them men), in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, found that whites were most likely to use cocaine while other ethnic groups tested positive for other drugs.
Nearly half (46%) of the arrestees consenting to tests
were positive for one of six drugs.
“Whites (32%), particularly white women (65%) were more likely to test positive for cocaine,” the report shows.
Mixed-race (50%) and Indian (39%) arrestees were more likely to test positive for Mandrax, a methaqualone-based hypnotic drug in tablet form, crushed and smoked in South Africa with cannabis.
Cannabis is popular across all groups — with almost 40% testing positive for it — but blacks are the least likely to show drug use, the report says.
The report concludes that attacking the supply of cannabis, known locally as dagga, is “like spitting in the ocean” and instead enforcement efforts should should be aimed at preventing it from leaving the country.
South Africa has overtaken Jamaica as the single largest supplier of cannabis to Britain and its export is connected to the import of harder drugs. – AFP