The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) and the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding on the fight against drug trafficking.
NDLEA Chairman Mohamed Buba Marwa and NCS Comptroller-General Hameed Ali signed the MoU in Abuja.
Marwa described the MoU as a benchmark for information and intelligence sharing.
He added, “It is also a platform for sharing operational and administrative experiences with a view to adopting best practises that work.
“With this united front, there can only be one assurance: that the criminal elements in our society will definitely be the losers and I assure you that they’ll certainly lose big as we come for them to put them where they rightly belong and cripple their crime syndicates.
On his part, Ali said the MoU was a signal to Nigeria and her international partners that the NCS and the NDLEA were committed to protecting Nigerian borders from illicit drugs.
“We’ve all along been doing this, finding drugs in the borders, but thank God the sole responsibility has been removed from us, and we had some relief.
“What we do now is that when we arrest the suspects, we hand them over to the NDLEA, where they will be pursued, investigated, and punished severely. The coming of Marwa has given us confidence that the suspects will be handled accordingly,” Ali said.
He expressed the commitment of the NCS to the implementation of the MoU.