Two days ago the news broke that the Director-General of NAFDAC, Professor Mojisola Adeyeye, is calling for life imprisonment and the death penalty for dealers in fake products, branding them “merchants of death.” According to ThisDay, between May and July 2026 her agency’s post-marketing surveillance visited 5,738 facilities and mopped up 7,210 non-compliant products, with food and water making up 3,633 and drugs and herbals 2,459.
Suspects behind counterfeit CWay water, Oral-B and Colgate toothpastes were arrested, and a factory in Nasarawa was caught repackaging rice. From 2025 to 2026, raids led to the seizure and destruction of goods worth over ₦1.5 trillion and another ₦15 billion destroyed in Ibadan.
Adeyeye noted that 64 convictions had been secured, with sentences of one to seven years without option of fine, but she insisted the penalties are too weak for the scale of the public health threat. She urged Nigerians to report directly to NAFDAC rather than trial by social media, and defended the agency’s rise since 2017 from “maturity level one” to level three, the first in Africa, as proof that NAFDAC can now stand with global regulators.
In almost the same breath came another cry for the gallows. On September 7, 2026, Mahmud Abdulraheem, Esq., Ph.D. in Mass Communication, Chief Promoter of Gerin FM 95.5 Ilorin, former GM of KWSBC/KWTV and former Head of Mass Communication at the University of Ilorin, published an urgent opinion titled: “Illicit Drugs and a Wasted Generation: Why Nigeria Must Adopt a Chinese-Style Crackdown.”.
He argues that Nigeria is in a national emergency with over 14 million Nigerians aged 15 to 64 using drugs, and that campuses, barracks and homes are bleeding talent to addiction and crime. He traces the slide to 1985, when the Buhari military decree that made drug trafficking a capital offence and executed three traffickers was abandoned, after which Nigeria moved from transit route to consumer nation.
Borrowing from China’s war on opium, which combined death penalties for large traffickers with school-based education, tight border tracking of precursor chemicals and three years of monitored rehabilitation, Abdulraheem asks for the NDLEA Act to be amended for death on cocaine, heroin, meth and fentanyl, for special drug courts to deliver judgment in six months, for proper funding of scanners and drones, for rehab centers in all six zones, and for the net to catch barons instead of only street boys. He also turns to parents, pastors, imams and traditional rulers to make anti-drug preaching weekly, and tells young people that drugs will not make them rich or manly, only broken.
I do not in any way downplay the danger. Fake drugs kill. Tramadol and mkpuru mmiri hollow out communities. But what I see emerging is a pattern I call the obsession with capital punishment, a reflex to reach for the harshest sanction as proof of seriousness, as if severity alone were policy.
Sociologically, this looks like what Emile Durkheim described as punishment as a ritual of collective conscience, and what Michel Foucault warned against when the spectacle of the scaffold substitutes for the boring work of institutions. In Nigeria it often plays as symbolism over substance, brinkmanship that wins applause without changing incentives.
We love to show strong will. We chant death for stealing, for bike snatching, for cyber fraud, for rape, and in some places we skip the court and go straight to jungle justice. Yet the crimes persist, sometimes even metastasize, as when children stage their own kidnappings or influencers cry rape to harvest sympathy and crowdfunding.
Look at the law books and you will see we are already heavy on the sword. Murder, treason, robbery with firearms and certain drug trafficking already attract death under the Criminal and Penal Codes. The Terrorism Prevention and Prohibition Act 2022 makes terrorism, membership of groups like Boko Haram, ISWAP and IPOB, financing, arms trafficking and concealment capital offences.
By Senate resolution in 2025, kidnapping and banditry were designated terrorism, with proposals to make death mandatory even where no one dies, and to extend it to informants, logistics men, harbourers and transporters. Life imprisonment sits beside these for rape under the VAPP Act, for human trafficking, for piracy, and for other terrorism-related acts. Between May and June 2026, 12 people were sentenced to death for terrorism and kidnapping, including convicts in the Owo church attack, and in May 2026 three men got life for abducting 46 pupils and teachers in Oyo. Ransom payment itself now carries at least 15 years.
If severity worked automatically, kidnapping should have vanished. Instead it is an epidemic. Criminology tells us why. Cesare Beccaria argued 250 years ago in On Crimes and Punishments that certainty of detection deters more than severity of punishment, and modern research keeps confirming it. A 2014 study in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology found that increases in the probability of arrest reduce crime far more than increases in sentence length. In Nigeria, the bottleneck is not the penalty on paper but the pipeline from report to conviction.
NAFDAC’s 64 convictions are commendable, but they scratch the surface. An NDLEA officer once told me how cases die: you report a dealer, and the first call the suspect gets is from inside. In many compounds you could, if you enforced the law to the letter, indict a significant portion of the population, and our prisons would burst. The problem is not that one year is too small, it is that one in ten does not see a courtroom at all.
The same paradox haunts corruption. People ask for a “China-style” therapy, but how many have EFCC and ICPC successfully prosecuted and jailed with the laws we already have? Without investigators, forensic capacity, case management and protection for witnesses, even death on the statute book is theatre. Compare this with most Western systems. The Council of Europe abolished capital punishment, yet France, Germany and the UK control fraud, cybercrime and trafficking through asset forfeiture, long prison terms, regulatory sanctions and, crucially, high probabilities of being caught. The United States retains the death penalty in some states, but reserves it almost entirely for aggravated murder, not for corruption or cyber fraud. The lesson is not that Nigerians are soft, it is that institutions, not slogans, move the needle.
This is why I welcome the other part of NDLEA Chairman Brig. Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa’s agenda, the call for mandatory drug integrity tests for politicians, appointees and aspirants, and for students and workers in sensitive sectors. His argument is simple: “A drug-addicted leader cannot make sound decisions for 200 million people,” and many of the criminals in our forests are high. The Senate has debated amending the NDLEA and Electoral Acts to back this, and some compliance has begun in NYSC camps and federal agencies. Critics worry about political weaponization, which is why the process must be transparent, rehabilitative and not just punitive. But it is a start in the right direction, applying the law at the top before we demand it at the bottom.
We also need honesty about power and complicity. When a senator is accused, rightly or wrongly, of ties to bandits, the public does not need more noise, it needs names, addresses, and a process that treats the powerful the way it treats the powerless. When a case like that of Chioma Egbuchu drags five years after the murder of Super TV CEO Michael Usifo Ataga, families exhaust themselves while confidence erodes. Justice delayed is deterrence denied.
So the obsession with capital punishment is understandable, but dangerous if it becomes our only language. Nigeria does not need more laws that we cannot execute. We need execution of the laws we have. That means funding, technology, intelligence, special courts, witness protection, and a culture where a report is not a death sentence for the whistleblower. It means treatment and skills for youth, not just sermons. It means leaders who submit to drug tests before they ask citizens to submit to raids.
Severity without certainty is symbolism. Certainty without fairness is tyranny. What will save this generation is not the loudest threat, but the quiet, stubborn work of making the law real, for the market woman in Ilorin, for the student in Lagos, for the senator in Abuja, and for every “merchant of death” who thinks he can hide in plain sight.
Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of People’s Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
