Akakan Umoh
A 38-year-old South African woman, Will Ann, who was arrested by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, for allegedly attempting to smuggle 5.75 kilograms of heroin into Nigeria while travelling with her three-year-old son, has proved her Minister wrong.
This came at the wake of some South Africans accusing some Nigerians in the country of peddling illicit drugs and deploying xenophobic attacks for them to leave South Africa.
Before then, South Africa’s Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, had linked Nigerians to alleged drug dens, challenging Nigeria to disclose the locations of alleged drug dens operated by Nigerians.
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Ntshavheni made the remark during a press briefing on Friday, June 26 while responding to questions on compensation for Nigerians who abandoned their property following renewed anti-migrant violence in South Africa.
Rather than discussing compensation canvassed for Nigerians who lost their properties in her country, she stated “We’ll be interested to know where the drug dens of Nigerians are. So, they can show us where they have been holding the drugs so that we can clean the drugs in South Africa quite urgently,” she said.
Though Nigerian government condemned her remark as inflammatory and capable of inciting further attacks against Nigerians living in South Africa, Ntshavheni did not retract it.
However, Ann, according to NDLEA, was arrested on Monday, July 6, 2026, during the inward clearance of passengers aboard Qatar Airways flight QR1433 from Doha.
The agency stated that the suspect allegedly concealed 14 large blocks of heroin in two suitcases and initially denied travelling with any checked-in luggage.
In a statement on Sunday by the agency’s Director of Media and Advocacy, Femi Babafemi, the anti-narcotics agency said its operatives established that the baggage tags matched the claim tags attached to the suspect’s passport, prompting her to admit ownership of the bags.
The statement read, “Though she initially denied travelling with checked-in bags, after operatives were able to quickly establish that the two bags containing the drugs had tags which tallied with the claim tags attached to her passport, she recanted and admitted ownership of the bags, adding that she forgot she had checked in the two bags.”
The agency added that the suspect claimed she travelled from Cambodia through Doha to Abuja.
NDLEA further alleged that intelligence indicated she was part of a transnational drug trafficking organisation operating along the Cambodia-South Africa axis with her husband and partner, Jan Coenraad De Jager.
In a separate operation, NDLEA operatives at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, arrested a 48-year-old commercial motorcycle rider, Onyechere Chinadu, after he arrived from Madagascar via Addis Ababa on an Ethiopian Airlines flight.
The agency stated that an initial search of his backpack uncovered 87 wraps of methamphetamine concealed in clothing.
According to the statement, the suspect confessed that he had worked as an okada rider in Lagos for 15 years before being recruited into drug trafficking by a Uganda-based associate.
“He said he ingested the recovered pellets of methamphetamine in Uganda before embarking on his planned journey to Madagascar to deliver the drug consignment,” the statement said.
The NDLEA added that after the suspect was denied entry into Madagascar, his sponsor allegedly rerouted him to Lagos, where he was arrested.
The agency revealed that the suspect was placed under observation because he could not state the exact number of pellets he had swallowed. Between his arrest and July 11, he excreted 13 additional pellets, bringing the total recovery to 100 wraps of methamphetamine weighing 1.715 kilograms.
At the Apapa Seaport in Lagos, NDLEA announced that it intercepted 8,287 bags of Canadian Loud, a synthetic cannabis strain, weighing 4,143.5 kilograms, with an estimated street value of over N10.3bn.
The drugs were discovered during a joint examination involving NDLEA officers, the Nigeria Customs Service, and other security agencies after weeks of surveillance on the container imported from Canada.
“The discovery followed weeks of targeted tracking and monitoring of the shipment since its departure from Montreal, Canada, by operatives of the Maritime Intelligence Unit of NDLEA in close collaboration with the Apapa Strategic Command of the Agency,” the statement added.
The agency also said its operatives foiled an attempt to export 2.5 kilograms of skunk concealed in a gas compressor destined for Cyprus through a Lagos courier company.
Beyond enforcement operations, NDLEA noted that its commands across the country sustained the War Against Drug Abuse sensitisation campaign with advocacy lectures in secondary schools in Ebonyi, Kano, Ekiti, and Ogun states, while the leadership of its Zone 14 Command paid an advocacy visit to Rivers State Governor Siminalayi Fubara.
The Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of NDLEA, Brig. Gen. Buba Marwa (retd), who commended the officers involved in the operations, praised the commands for combining drug supply reduction efforts with public sensitisation.
Marwa charged officers across the country “not to rest on their past laurels” in the agency’s campaign against illicit drug trafficking and abuse.
