Buba Marwa, the chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), on Thursday said the agency needs more sniffer dogs to undertake war against drug trafficking in the country.
The NDLEA boss, who disclosed while defending his agency’s budget before the House of Representatives commitee on Narcotics said each sniffer dog would cost about $20,000
Per current rates at the parallel market ( about N800 per dollar), a sniffer dog would cost the Nigerian government N16 millon, going by Mr Marwas proposition.
“We definitely need dogs. Dogs cost between $15,000 and $20,000 each,” Mr Marwa said. “I won’t state in this forum to the hearing of the cartels how many dogs we have. We need more dogs.”
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Speaking further, he said “I will take the opportunity to express appreciation to the German criminal police — we work with them.
“On the dogs, they supply the dogs. They just supplied a few. More importantly, they are building a six million euro dog training school in Lagos which would be used also with our neighbours in ECOWAS.”
Mr Marwa did not state how many sniffer dogs the agency needs, making it difficult to estimate how much the NDLEA will spend on sniffer dogs in the proposed budget.
However, he explained that the agency is proposing a N40 billion budget for 2023.
He added that recurrent expenditure will cost about N18.6 billion, while capital expenditure will cost N21.4 billion
