NDLEA Is Poorly Funded, House Laments

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The House of Representatives has decried the ‘poor funding’ of the National Drugs Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), saying the agency is living on charity.


The Chairman of the House Committee on Narcotics, Hon. Francis Agbo, stated this at the inaugural meeting of the Committee in Abuja on Monday, as he however assured Nigerians that the ninth National Assembly would redress the situation as he was already working on a bill for the agency’s autonomy.

He noted that the personnel cost of the agency presently stood at N8 billion which he said took a large chunk of the annual budget of the agency while only about N200million was meant for its operations.


Agbo lamented that the envelope system of budgeting being adopted by the Ministry of Justice for the agency was hampering its operations.


He said: “As at today, such an all-important agency is being underfunded; the agency lives on charity, and has only eight sniffer dogs for its operations, which were even donated to the country by the German Government."



Agbo said it has gotten to such a pathetic situation that its staff deployment is now two staff to a local government area with only a vehicle to cover six local government areas.


“While the agency is fighting drug wars with analogue weapons used during the civil war, the traffickers are using modern and sophisticated weapons to boost their illicit trafficking."

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