From: This Day Live
By Ayo Ajayi
The world has long been awakened to the harsh reality of terrorism and criminal money laundering. In Nigeria, the Boko Haram insurgency has brought home the reality of terrorism with even more poignancy. Terrorism typically needs to be funded and globally, it has since been established that illicit trade in tobacco is one of the major avenues by which terrorism is funded.
Since the dawn of terrorism, procuring finances sufficient to sustain terror operations has been a priority for the terrorists. The illicit sale of cigarettes and other commodities by terrorist groups and their supporters has become a crucial part of their funding activities.
However, one of the measures which anti-tobacco activists have been advocating to reduce tobacco consumption because of its widely-acknowledged harmful effects, is the raising of taxes payable by tobacco manufacturing companies. The argument is that once the tobacco producer is heavily taxed, it would be forced to raise the price of its cigarettes, which will now be beyond the financial capability of the ordinary consumers who would then be forced to either reduce their smoking expenditure or quit smoking totally.
But raising the tax on cigarettes widens the difference between the wholesale price and the retail price of the product and inadvertently creates opportunity for traffickers who evade the tax and gain the profits. Today, cigarette traffickers can make as much as $60 per carton of cigarettes sold illicitly. Because of the immense profits in the illicit cigarette trade, as well as the potentially low penalties for getting caught, illicit cigarette trafficking now rivals drug trafficking as the method of choice to fill the bank accounts of terrorists and terrorist groups.
Dr Rasheed Adeniji, a director at the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Magodo, Lagos, said in an interview that there is proven connection between global trade in illicit cigarette and the funding of terrorism.
According to him, “Much money made from illegal tobacco trade is laundered in banks all over the world to fund the activities of terrorist groups such as the Al Qaeda in the Magreb region, Al Shabaab in East Africa and even the Boko Haram in Nigeria.”
Indeed, investigators have discovered that traffickers in the United States and the United Kingdom are providing material support to the Hezbollah and the Real IRA (RIRA), among other terrorist groups. In addition, law enforcement research indicates that groups tied to al Qaeda, Hamas, PKK (the Kurdish Workers Party), and Islamic Jihad (both Egyptian and Palestinian) are involved in the illicit trafficking of cigarettes.
