Malawi police are losing the battle against crafty marijuana smugglers, who have evaded a nationwide clampdown by transporting the popular narcotic in hearses, coffins and ambulances, with the support of rogue government officials.
Police spokesperson George Chikowi told IPS that Malawi remains one of Africa’s largest producers, despite concerted efforts to rid the country of the illicit crop.
“Malawi remains the second-largest marijuana producer in Southern Africa, after South Africa. This is despite our best efforts to clampdown on the production, trafficking and consumption of marijuana,” said Chikowi.
To evade the police, the majority of the growers have retreated to a remote mountainous areas where there are no good roads.
The police have been tipped off that some of the larger syndicates are hiding their marijuana among the country’s massive tea, coffee and sugar plantations, Chikowi said.
“It’s the traffickers who are coming up with the most innovative schemes to avoid detection. They’re transporting the stuff in coffins inside hearses, and have even equipped their own ambulances to get through roadblocks and discourage proper searches,” he said.
Some of the drug barons “bribe junior police officers” to transport hemp in police vans, he added. The officers take bribes as a way of supplementing their meagre salary of less than $200 a month.
“These gangs are also using people’s aversion to cemeteries and are using graveyards as their storehouses or distribution points,” Chikowi said.
Six drug traffickers were recently arrested in a cemetery at Nkhotakota, central Malawi, with 28 large bags of marijuana. The consignment was allegedly on its way from Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre, to South Africa, via a back-road network using trucks, ambulances, ferries and hearses.
The six were nabbed after villagers became concerned with the defilement of their cemetery.
Such arrests are unlikely to deter the other farmers in Nkhotakota from growing the herb, which is more lucrative than tobacco, Malawi’s main cash crop.
“Tobacco prices are very low on the world market. And, since Malawi depends on agriculture, what other cash crop can I grow to bring me more money?” asks Ngambo Nkulu (42).
Chikowi said the police are planning to declare war on illicit trafficking by chartering a South African police or military aircraft to destroy marijuana plantations in remote parts of Malawi. He said the police need spray planes and helicopters because these remote marijuana plantations are inaccessible by road.
“It is our desire to carry out such an operation, if we have financial resources to hire the chopper. We believe this type of operation can successfully curb the supply, source and the illicit trafficking of hemp. Our intention is not to reduce, but to eradicate the cultivation, smoking, supply and transport of hemp,” said Chikowi.
“We also need cars and investigators to spend some months in the bush where hemp is grown,” he said.
Despite the transport difficulties, Chikowi said the police have carried out several raids across the country. During the last one, in November last year, the police raided farms in the Nkhotakota and Mzimba districts in central and northern Malawi respectively, where they destroyed more than 663 000 marijuana plants, equivalent to 61 000kg of the herb.
A United Nations Development Programme report released late last year indicates that the marijuana is under cultivation in at least 156 000ha of land in Malawi.
A study by Peter Gastrow of the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, Mind-blowing: The Cannabis Trade In Southern Africa, says South Africa is the fourth-largest producer in the world. The report says during 2000, the South African Police Service seized 718 000kg of the drug — 16% of the world total confiscated by police. Two years ago 496 000kg of dagga, worth R450-million, was seized.
“Of significance for this study is the UN’s conclusion that nearly a quarter of the cannabis seizures worldwide between 1999 and 2000 occurred in Southern Africa. In 2000 the large global increase was mainly the result of seizures in some African countries, specifically South Africa (718 tonnes), Malawi (312 tonnes) and Nigeria (272 tonnes).
“The UN further found that Africa’s share of global seizures increased from approximately 10% to 32%, while the share of the Americas decreased from 80% to 61%. In short there appears to have been a global upsurge in demand for cannabis and a corresponding increase in supply, increasingly from southern Africa,” the report says.
Malawi police statistics show that 80% of the annual production of marijuana finds its way across the borders to the lucrative South African market. Some of it ends up in European and American markets.
Malawi’s brand of cannabis contains high levels cannabenoids — chemical substances that have the power to change people’s moods — and is believed to be one of the most potent in the world.
The fight against marijuana cultivation, consumption and trafficking has further been complicated by Rastafarians, who are pressuring the government to legalise the herb.
The Rastafarians are seeking assistance from the Malawi Ombudsman to help them legalise dagga, which they say is used as part of their religion.
Rastafarians are followers of a religion from Jamaica, which teaches that West Indians will return to Africa and that Haile Selassie, the former emperor of Ethiopia, is to be worshipped.
Interestingly, the Rastafarians have an ally in the ruling United Democratic Front parliamentarian and former deputy agriculture minister, Joe Manduwa, who at one time asked Parliament to legalise the cultivation of hemp to boost the country’s foreign earnings.
“It’s high time Malawi resorts to growing hemp to boost its foreign earnings,” said Manduwa.
The idea was shot down by his fellow legislators.
Statistics at Zomba Mental Hospital, Malawi’s only mental asylum indicate that six out of 10 mentally ill inmates there have smoked marijuana. — IPS