The national publicity secretary of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), Bishop Emmah Isong, has called on the federal government and all stakeholders to intensify efforts at fighting drug abuse in the country. He said it was difficult to fight and win the war against crime without first attacking drug abuse which he identified as the root cause of all criminalities.
Isong, who is also the founder of the Calabar-based Christian Central Chapel International (CCCI), said this in Calabar, weekend during the 7th Emmah Isong Annual Public Lecture, which had the theme, ‘Curbing Drug Abuse: A Major Panacea to Reducing Crime in Nigeria.’
While maintaining that the society would not succeed in its fight against crime if it does not fight drug abuse first, Bishop Isong said, “We need to fight illicit drug use before fighting crime because we all saw the level of destruction that happened in Cross River and other places when the #EndSARS protest was hijacked by hoodlums. This couldn’t have been possible without the use of drugs.
“We have enough laws already on ground; in fact, in the next 300 years we should not make another law. All we need is implementation of the existing reports. Our problem is the lack of political will by leaders and the led; we all need to come together and change the narrative by stopping the definition of government as a particular person but seeing it as you and I.”
The bishop said the annual lecture was his platform to answer many unanswered societal questions, and insisted that it was foolhardy to pretend that substance abuse, which he said leads to multiplication of cult groups, kidnapping, armed robbery and all manner of criminalities, was not a huge challenge in the society.
Speaking earlier on the theme of the annual lecture, the guest lecturer, Mr. Rekpene Bassey, said people abused drugs for various bio-psycosocial reasons and that the prevalence of drug abuse was increasing by the day.
Bassey who was a onetime Cross River state Security Adviser, said “In a survey carried out in 2017 by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Federal Ministry of Health and United Nations Office on Drug and Crimes (UNODC) discovered that 14.4 per cent of persons between the ages of 15 and 64 were involved in the use of dangerous drugs.
“It further revealed that while 66 per cent of children on the streets are on drugs, 88 per cent of these children are actively involved in crime. In the next 25 years, if nothing is done, over 100 million Nigerians will be involved in drug abuse.”
