LONDON: If you walked through Agadez, Niger, a decade ago, and asked for directions to the home of former Prime Minister Brigi Rafini, you would get blank stares. If you asked for Cherif Ould Abidine’s house, everyone could point the way.
Abidine — better known as “Cherif Cocaine” — was far more than a businessman. Until his death due to illness in February 2016, he dominated Agadez as both a political powerhouse and allegedly the region’s most notorious drug lord.
Transport mogul, campaign financier, and alleged kingpin of the Sahel’s illicit trade, his web of influence included ties to tobacco giant Philip Morris. His bus company, 3STV, still runs routes that reportedly once served as cover for trafficking cocaine and other drugs through the region.
Linked to figures like Goumour Bidika — a key intermediary between terrorism and trafficking in Agadez — and Cherif Kaffa of the Al-Qaeda offshoot Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, Abidine’s sphere blurred the lines between business, politics, and organized crime.
After his death, heirs and former partners carried on the smuggling networks, but growing law enforcement pressure and shifting regional power have fractured the local drug market, making it harder to track and more contested.
“Worldwide cocaine production has dramatically increased,” Luca Raineri, security studies professor at Sant’Anna School in Pisa, told Arab News.
“There is this new trend, but whether it has particularly impacted the Sahara and Sahel is hard to gauge, because the only way we have to find out is by relying on seizure data, which is deeply flawed.”
Cocaine seizures have surged sharply in recent years, rising 48 percent compared to 2022. Concentrated chiefly in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, seizures soared from an average of 13 kg annually between 2015 and 2020 to 1,466 kg in 2022.
Cocaine is displayed to journalists after being seized by Guinea-Bissau's judicial police in the capital Bissau. (Reuters/File)
Before full data for 2023 was available, the UN reported that Mauritania alone seized 2.3 tonnes of cocaine in the first half of the year.
Despite these increases, state capacity across the Sahel — including Niger — remains limited and is often undermined by widespread corruption.
Transparency International ranks Sahelian countries among the world’s most corrupt, exposing systemic weaknesses that permeate political and community leadership and erode governance and development.
Meanwhile, armed groups finance themselves through drug trafficking, while rising local cocaine consumption — though still limited by affordability and overshadowed by cannabis, kush, and pharmaceutical opioids — further strains fragile health systems and the social fabric.
As a result, local communities bear the harshest burden of the growing and increasingly complex drug trade.
“Cocaine trafficking more broadly in West Africa, of which the Sahel is only an extension, relies on a well-established infrastructure involving economic actors operating in various sectors, activity offering a legal facade and corrupt political, administrative, and security force actors,” William Assanvo, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, told Arab News.
He said recent investigations into cocaine trafficking networks, particularly in Cote d’Ivoire, highlighted the involvement of foreign nationals, often from Europe and Latin America, who operate in the region as intermediaries between the countries of origin and destination.
A detention centre in Bamako, Mali. (Supplied)
Despite these findings, understanding the full scope of the Sahel’s cocaine trade remains a significant challenge. Raineri says this is because figures are often actively concealed due to potential state involvement.
“We don’t know what passes through and what doesn’t,” Raineri said. “Figures aren’t always made public. Sometimes they are concealed because, on some occasions, some state officials may be involved.”
Yet for Raineri, today’s scene is perhaps less “interesting” than a few years ago.
June’s World Drug Report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, soberly declared a “new era of global instability” in the drug trade, with production, seizures, and cocaine use all climbing to record highs.
In 2023, cocaine became the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market, with output up nearly 34 percent in just a year.
After a lull, West and Central Africa — especially the Sahel — appeared to be reclaiming their place as major global drug conduits, again becoming a frontier in a cocaine arena once limited to Latin America.
This echoed the first major cocaine surge through the Sahel in the 2000s, as Latin American cartels, squeezed by US and European law enforcement, turned to West Africa.
Rising supply, booming European demand, and pressure on direct maritime routes all fed this shift, made easier by reduced violence, porous borders, and, at times, collusion with local officials.
Now, with maritime alternatives growing cheaper and less controlled, and instability making parts of the Sahel riskier, the region appears to be slipping from the traffickers’ top choices.
Authoritiesexamine cocaine in Guinea-Bissau. (Supplied)
Shipments typically arrive first at West African ports, where cocaine is repackaged. From these hubs, cargo either continues by sea to North African ports, often ending up in Tobruk, Libya, or travels overland through the vast, sparsely populated Sahel to reach Europe and wealthy Middle Eastern countries, though data is scarce to confirm such claims.
“At this moment, it doesn’t seem the Sahel is the preferred region for smugglers,” said Raineri, who has investigated the transnational phenomena of security relevance across trafficking, crime and terrorism in the region for over 10 years.
“There is significant instability in the Sahel, which makes entrusting valuable cocaine shipments to local traffickers risky. Meanwhile, alternative routes, especially maritime ones, have become more attractive. They are cheaper and less tightly controlled.”
In a May bulletin, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, or GI-TOC, reported that between 2019 and 2023, northbound cocaine trafficking across the Sahel had resurged, with rising consumption of cocaine and crack in parts of the region.
While regional conditions enabled this uptick, dramatic political change since 2023 in the Sahel and Libya “appear to have disrupted cocaine trafficking through northern Niger and to a lesser extent northern Mali.”
The July 2023 coup in Niger suspended the constitution, ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, and disrupted a system that had long protected traffickers and allowed impunity, often through collusion with state actors.
In August that same year, renewed conflict in northern Mali between rebel groups, Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wa Al-Muslimin extremists, Russian-supported Malian forces and Wagner mercenaries further destabilized the region, forcing traffickers to seek new routes.
GI-TOC stressed that increased trafficking through southern Mali and Senegal does not necessarily signal more northbound flows but rather the adaptiveness of traffickers, redirecting cargo to coastal routes.
An anti-drug mural is seen at the office of an NGO that fights drug use in the Malian capital Bamako. (Reuters/File)
Before these changes, surging cocaine flows stoked fears of deeper involvement by extremist groups like the JNIM and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. These groups, expanding and competing for territory, are well-positioned to benefit financially from the drug trade.
The UNODC noted “limited” direct evidence of their involvement, but emphasized their indirect benefit through taxing traffickers operating in their zones.
“There has been a lot of commentary about the possible involvement of extremist groups — what is labeled narcoterrorism,” said Raineri. “In reality, this hypothesis is less credible today than years ago.”
While members of various extremist groups were previously involved in the cocaine trade, Raineri says they now mainly play a “protectionist role.”
“There was an internal doctrinal debate within Al-Qaeda,” he said. “Leaders in the Maghreb asked their Central Asian superiors how to handle these trafficking networks.
“Ultimately, the prevailing opinion was that such trafficking could be leveraged to fund jihad, but fighters and the populations under their control must not consume these drugs.”
Raineri described a patchwork drug market where armed groups act as either traffickers or protectors.
Shipments typically arrive first at West African ports, where cocaine is repackaged. (Reuters/File)
“These territorial protectors extort and collect rackets from any economic activity, from livestock to ‘trading activities’ such as fuel, timber, and of course, drug trafficking whenever they gain access. All armed groups controlling territory — including extremists — do this.”
While there are concerns about extremist groups exploiting the drug market, Raineri says most territorial protectors work with state authorities, who often shift blame onto extremist groups to undermine their legitimacy.
“The main protectors are on the side of the state, and local governments do everything possible to shift blame onto their enemies — the terrorists,” Raineri said. “It’s a way to delegitimize extremist groups that present themselves as fighting a corrupt state.”
Assanvo offered a similar perspective, arguing that extremist groups are not the prime movers in regional trafficking.
“The automatic link between drug trafficking and terrorism in the Sahel, which has been made for several years, is very often exaggerated and should be put into perspective or at least questioned,” he said.
“For the moment, there is little concrete evidence of the involvement of terrorist groups in drug trafficking, beyond the role that some of them play in facilitating transport or securing convoys crossing areas under their control.”
Assanvo added that contrary to many assumptions, traffickers require stability and security in order to profit.
“The political instability caused by the coups d’etat that have occurred in recent years in the Sahel and the situation in Libya is not necessarily a good thing for them. On the other hand, the withdrawal of French and American forces from the Sahel (Mali and Niger) has left the field open to trafficking in this part of the region.”
Local communities bear the harshest burden of the growing and increasingly complex drug trade. (Reuters/File)
Raineri explained that much of the analysis around narcoterrorism is, therefore, an outdated narrative, fitting a pattern favored by the US, France, and the wider international community.
“For the past 10 to 15 years, the absolute priority for the French and Americans in the Sahel has been fighting terrorism. In the name of counterterrorism, deals were struck with known traffickers — overlooked as long as they could be leveraged against terrorists.
“This narco-extremist narrative is an old story with media appeal. It plays well politically for governments seeking to paint their rivals as mere bandits.”
Raineri noted only one case of decisive state action against a heavily state-protected figure: Goumour Bidika, the protégé of Cherif Ould Abidine — Niger’s infamous “Cherif Cocaine.”
“Everyone knew he (Abidine) was the ‘don’ of the city (Agadez), shielded by the state and untouchable,” said Raineri.
“And one of those who took over the role was arrested only once, likely after a tip-off from the Americans, because he ended up with a shipment of drugs reportedly linked to Hezbollah and Lebanese interests.
“This particularly alarmed the Americans, who insisted that such a load could not be allowed to pass through.”
