By Haruna Salami
MTN Foundation, National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, (NDLEA), United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) and other stakeholders have marked the 2025 World Drug Day with special focus on preventing Nigerian youths from entering substance and drug abuse.
In this year’s edition, an advocacy walk was marked in Lagos, Kano and Abuja.
Participants in Abuja converged at the Convocation Square, University of Abuja, Gwagwalada campus – advocacy walk to commemorate the International Day Against Drug Abuse & Illicit trafficking (World Drug Day) 2025.
The theme of this year’s edition is “The Evidence is Clear: Invest in Prevention” with a slogan “Break the Cycle (#StopOrganizedCrime)”.
The Abuja edition had participants from NDLEA, UNODC, Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), Federal Ministry of Education (FMOE), Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Security Agencies, Federal Road Safety Corp, CSOs, Youth Corp Members, Students and Media Crew.
In his remarks, Barrister Shadrach Haruna said the NDLEA and her partners are working together to prevent drug use and drug abuse, adding that “if you prevent the drug use and drug trafficking, it will be so clear that we don’t need to do the enforcement”.
He said the prevention comes in the way of reducing drug supply and also doing effective enforcement to ensure that nobody is trafficking drugs. That is why we have this collaboration with MTN Foundation this morning to do a walk against substance abuse”.
The choice of a university, according to Haruna is because the organisers want to connect to the youth since a university is “the epitome of youth development where we have a lot of people who can resonate with the environment, most people who are into drug use”.
“We start the awareness from a university to show that we are concerned about the youth and if we are able to prevent drug use amongst the youth, then we would have reduced almost 75 percent of drug use in the country”.
According to him, the effort of the NDLEA and its partners is yielding result because countries like Bangkok, Singapore where most of the prisons there are peopled by Nigerian drug traffickers, the story is changing.
“Just towards the end of last year, the ambassador of Thailand in Nigeria came to NDLEA to inform us that the Nigerian populations in prison has reduced considerably, which shows that the effort NDLEA and our partners are doing are really yielding a lot of results”.
Specifically, he said the statistics given to his agency in 2018 by UN show about 14.7 million Nigerians are into drugs, majority of who are actually youth.
The Executive Director, MTN Foundation, Odunayo Sanya said the MTN Foundation Anti Substance Abuse Programme (ASAP), which was launched in 2019 knows Nigeria is a country with about 70% of the population made up of young people below the age of 25%.
She said if you look at the statistics of drug abuse or substance abuse in the country, you see that it’s rising. So, if nothing is done then we’re actually endangered as a nation.
“For us at the foundation, it’s always been about youth development. We want to meet the sustainable development goals, but also in doing that we want to contribute to building a stronger nation.
“When we put all of the statistics together, it was important that we stepped in to advocate against drug abuse. The inspiration really is the Nigerian youth and the fact that we want to be able to contribute to creating a future that they can thrive in.
“The ASAP initiative, over the years, we have continued to partner with the NDLEA and the UNODC and specifically last year, we upped the ante as we were able to engage close to about 30,000 Nigerian students in public schools across the six geopolitical regions and the engagement was giving them information about substance abuse and how to make the right choices.
“We also partnered with the John Maxwell Foundation, which is very strong in leadership. So, on the one side, as we tell them about the dangers of drug abuse, we’re equipping them with tools that they need to make the right choices, to build resilience as individuals, and we’ve seen a lot of them do well.
“The teachers have given us feedback of how rates of delinquencies have dropped in their schools and the children are better. We have our reports to show where parents tell us that it’s really had a positive impact on their children and even other children in the family because those children go back home to tell their siblings and people around them about the dangers of drug abuse”, Sanya said.
Pharmacist Henrietta Bakura-Onyeneke, Director, Narcotics and Drug Abuse Division, Federal Ministry of Health said the event of the day was “laudable” because it’s based on United Nations guidance that we set aside a day and commemorate on World Drug Day in the sense that the menace of drug abuse and related activities seems to be on the increase”.
She said “awareness is one of the most important strategies that you can put on ground to ensure that people are informed about the negative use of drugs that will now lead them into other social vices that will not mean well for the society.
“It marks that awareness mechanism that we need to give to the youth, to every citizen in our country, Nigeria, and say no to drugs in line with this annual theme ‘evidence is clear, invest in prevention’ of drug abuse, which she described as “very apt and key.
“My message to the youth is, first and foremost, to imbibe the orientation of patience, not getting things through the back door.
“When you graduate, be patient enough, even though we know government and even the private sector have a role to play in terms of provision of jobs”, she advised that entrepreneurship should be expanded to the largest level we can imagine because it’s not everybody actually that can do a white collar job”.
Some of the students who expressed their delight at the event include Okapi Bethel, Director of Socials, Student Union Government, University of Abuja who said “I’m very happy because this is the first I’m witnessing this kind of programme where students are engaged. We will support it and say no to drug abuse”.
For John Williams, 300 Level, Sociology Student, Secretary General, SUG, UniAbuja, “it is a very good initiative from NDLEA, MTN and others. It is a fight, which everybody must be involved to campaign against substance abuse. I’m particularly happy that it’s happening on campus”.
He said the rate of drug abuse in UniAbuja is “under control” due to the efforts of the university authority.
Owuka Chinemere Michael (aka Hon. Bishop), 300 level, Political Science student, SUG Povost, UniAbuja described it as a “wonderful initiative” right from previous day (Friday) when they went out on awareness creation around the campus to the actual event Saturday.
“As SUG Provost, I must commend the NDLEA, MTN and others for this great initiative”, just as he made it known to fellow youths who are into drug abuse that “the only thing that can cage your future is drug abuse”.
