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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