Africa: Unusual Suspects – Elders in West Africa’s Changing Drug Trade

The apparent rise of trafficking by older adults could reflect a new criminal adaptation rather than individual criminality.

Adults aged 50 and over are becoming more visible in West African drug operations, although data availability and official understandings of this phenomenon vary across states.

Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) website suggests that at least 32 people aged 60 to 101 have been arrested in Nigeria since January. When suspects aged 50-59 are included, arrests rise to 48. Rough calculations suggest a ratio of about one elder to every five younger adults arrested.

NDLEA Media and Advocacy Director Femi Babafemi told ISS Today that available data, including ‘consistent arrests of suspects aged 55 to 80 nationwide, already reflects a systemic pattern rather than a random occurrence.’

Besides Nigeria, Babafemi said drug syndicates were increasingly deploying elderly couriers across porous land borders and informal maritime routes in the rest of West Africa. Suspects aged 65-70 have been arrested for trafficking cannabis in Cameroon and Senegal.

While several countries document individual cases, regional information is not available from the West African Epidemiology Network on Drug Use. Existing data is not formatted for comparative analysis, making elderly drug couriers a poorly studied demographic.

Involvement of elders in trafficking stands out because suspects do not fit security agents’ profile of regular, typically young, offenders. The trend also contradicts the cultural reverence traditionally accorded to elders in African societies, which is precisely what makes them attractive for recruitment by drug networks.

The connection of elders to the drug trade is not new in Africa or internationally. ‘Old women’ in Ghana acted as drug mules and distributors in 2002 and 2014, and a 2008 British report noted a ‘dramatic rise in women couriers in their late sixties and seventies’ – many of them Nigerian or Ghanaian. Other reports document the participation of Ivoirian and Guinean elders.

In 2016, elderly drug couriers were identified in North America, Australia, Hong Kong and Europe. United States targets were recruited via social media and telemarketing fraud, and offered large cash payments for carrying gifts to intended recipients.

In 2025, elderly traffickers were arrested in Chile, the United Kingdom and India, where networks targeted older people living alone who needed money. Many were unaware of their involvement in trafficking. In May 2025, UK Border Force officers apprehended two German men aged 80 and 67 travelling to Hong Kong with methamphetamine. They were victims of a Nigerian network targeting elders as drug couriers using email finance scams.

Older people are also involved in leadership and operations, as shown by the May arrest of a 63-year-old drug baron allegedly heading a Nigerian-Mexican methamphetamine operation. They act as couriers, distributors/retailers, intermediaries, producers, storage providers and kingpins, with many increasingly handling cocaine, methamphetamine and synthetic cannabis.

Although women are not new to drug trafficking, older women’s involvement in recent cases is notable. Their role challenges gender norms that sacralise elderly women. It also highlights how gendered inequalities in asset ownership and economic dependency can increase vulnerability to recruitment and exploitation by criminal networks, says NDLEA Drug Demand Reduction Expert and Substance Abuse Counsellor Funmilayo Bamisaye.

West Africa has become more central in global drug trafficking – including as a consumer market – as restrictions tighten in Latin America. In 2024, 25 891 drug-related arrests were made across 13 West African countries.

In July, Liberian authorities seized nearly four tonnes of cocaine with a street value of around US$317 million. In Nigeria, two industrial-scale methamphetamine laboratories were discovered in May and June, while Senegal has been tagged as the new transit hub for cocaine consumed in Europe.

While much of West Africa has evolved from a consumer market to a trafficking corridor, Nigeria has become a synthetic drug producer and exporter. This is likely connected with other organised crime.

Improved enforcement efforts are forcing an ‘adaptive tactical shift’ by drug networks, says Babafemi. But many cases slip through: over 100 tonnes of cocaine were trafficked from West Africa to Europe last year. Customs officials note the difficulties in identifying unlikely suspects, suggesting knowledge gaps about who is profiled and how suspects are categorised.

In West Africa, elder involvement in the drug trade, which mirrors Boko Haram’s targeting of women for arms and drug smuggling and violence, raises questions about motivations and driving factors. A confluence of dynamics increases elder vulnerabilities and influences their co-optation by criminal groups. Economic hardship and loss of social welfare and family support systems during conflict – especially in rural agrarian economies – are recurring factors.

Babafemi says some older people are recruited through relationships of trust, including by family members and other acquaintances, while others have prior histories of criminal involvement. Urgent medical needs, loneliness, lack of awareness and social isolation also make older adults more susceptible to criminal co-optation.

Nigerian media have expressed concerns that ‘grandparents’ becoming criminal agents signals social deterioration. This is especially the case in African cultures, where the elderly, who hold moral authority that dissuades younger people from disruptive behaviour, now sell drugs to and involve children in drug trafficking.

One expert told ISS Today that anti-trafficking campaigns target all demographics. However, elder criminality raises complex debates around how law enforcement determines culpability in cases of deception, and how sentencing accounts for older suspects with disabilities and severe medical conditions.

As food insecurity increasingly converges with other West African crises, elder criminality will likely keep expanding. To respond effectively, more research is needed on why and how elders become involved. Establishing a consistent age threshold for defining older offenders would facilitate detection, measurement and cross-country comparison.

Security agencies should review profiling assumptions to respond to the evolving role of older adults in organised crime, particularly drug trafficking. The focus should be less on profiling offender categories and more on understanding network structures, financial flows and enabling environments that fuel trafficking. Responses should be intelligence-led, data-driven, proportionate and rights-based.

Humanitarian organisations should proactively review and strengthen mechanisms to protect those elders most vulnerable to criminal recruitment and exploitation.

By ISS.