NDLEA's Marwa Advocates for Confiscating Drug Wealth

Brig Gen Mohamed Buba Marwa (rtd), the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), warned that the war against drug trafficking cannot be won solely through arrests but requires confiscating the proceeds of crime. He made this statement during his presentation titled “Criminal Property and the Criminal Process: How Can We Make it More Effective?” at the 43rd Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime, organized by the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Marwa called for enhanced international cooperation to seize criminal proceeds and emphasized that criminal justice systems should focus on making crime unprofitable. He stated that a trafficker who retains wealth after arrest has not been truly defeated.

The NDLEA has implemented six strategies for asset recovery, resulting in the recovery of $4.2 million from a property linked to a fugitive drug suspect, demonstrating that fugitives cannot evade the process and retain the benefits of crime.