By Moyiga Nduru
NAIROBI, Feb 25 1998 (IPS)

Kenya’s Indian Ocean port of Mombasa is the economic hub of the East African region, handling not only legitimate trade, but also a large flow of narcotics into the region and beyond.

The port, some 500 kilometres south-east of the capital city, Nairobi, serves landlocked Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, as well as parts of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire.

Kenya’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) boss, Mark Too, said this week that the Kenyan police, along with CID’s anti- narcotics unit, was engaged in an effort to rid the country of being a transit point for heroin, cocaine and mandrax in the sub- region.

“It will be a hard and a challenging job for law enforcement officers,” he said.

Too made the remarks during a regional conference on narcotics in Nyeri, central Kenya, attended by colleagues from Uganda and Tanzania.

During the meeting, held Feb. 24 and Feb. 25, Too urged Uganda and Tanzania to join hands with Kenya to stamp out the growing drug menace in the region. “We shall win if we jointly target drug barons within our region and beyond,” he said.

Too said traffickers were increasingly becoming smarter as they cleverly hide drugs when transporting them by couriers or as cargo. He said soft drugs like bhang — cannabis sativa — are also becoming hard to detect and eradicate, because they are mostly grown in remote forests, valleys and mountains.

Too’s statement came barely a day after a Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) official, Tom Amulavu Amisi, claimed that more than 600 acres of land in Mount Kenya have been turned into a bhang plantation guarded by a group of armed men.

“The plantation is guarded by armed people who attack game rangers who go to destroy the drug,” Amisi was quoted by Kenya’s independent newspaper the ‘Daily Nation’ as saying.

Koli Luc Kouame, the regional representative of the United Nations Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), told the conference that drug barons preferred Kenya as “a port of call”, because it is approachable by sea, has a big tourism industry and is a lucrative market for pharmaceuticals.

According to Kouame, the United Nations has provided more than 500,000 U.S. Dollars through the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to fight the growing drug trafficking in the region.

The head of the Uganda police anti-narcotics unit, Johnson Ayela, said last week that the sub-region was transforming from a drug transit area to a consumption zone.

He added that Malaba and Busia on Uganda’s eastern border with Kenya are the principal exit and entry points for the drugs, while Mutukula in the south caters for the entry and exit of drugs between Uganda and Tanzania.

Latest statistics here show that more than 20 tonnes of drugs were seized between October 1995 and August 1996 at Jomo Kenyatta International airport, Nairobi, and at Mombasa port.

Most of the heroin and mandrax — a depressant in demand in the region — transiting through Kenya originates in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Cocaine sails into Mombasa from Latin America.

Of late, parents also have sounded an alarm at the drug barons increased targetting of youth. Kenya’s Director of Education, Sammy Kyungu, recently urged Kenyans to join ranks against drugs. “It must be fought at every level, in homes, schools and workplaces. We cannot afford to become a country of drug-dependent people. We must all work to get rid of this evil,” he said.

The magnitude of drug consumption among the youth has been highlighted by Michael Jackobam, who heads Kenya’s anti-narcotics unit. He was recently quoted by the ‘Daily Nation’ as saying that 40 percent of the students in secondary schools, colleges and universities in Kenya were on drugs supplied mostly by non- teaching staff and outsiders.

A growing number of concerned Kenyan politicians like George Saitoti, who is the Minister of Economic Planning, also have added their voices to “the emergence of the syndicated trafficking of drugs”.

“The drug problem, although rather new to the continent, is one of the evils that we have to join hands, both in the public and private sectors, to completely eradicate,” Saitoti told a group of business people from the region here recently. He said drugs could have devastating effects on the population, especially the youth who are the future leaders.

“We cannot, as governments and business leaders in Africa, allow syndicated or any other form of drugs trade to take root in our region,” he said. “The Kenyan government will work tirelessly, in close collaboration with other similarly concerned governments to completely eradicate the trafficking of drugs from our region.”

The maximum penalty for contravening Kenya’s Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act is life imprisonment. But stiff sentencing has so far not worked as a deterrent to the highly lucrative narcotics trade.

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