West Africa Cannot Afford to Fight Jos Leijdekkers One Border at a Time

Jos Leijdekkers’ fingerprints are turning up in port after port, patrol after patrol, from Freetown to Tema to a beach in Liberia — not because one fugitive is unusually clever, but because West Africa keeps fighting him one border at a time. Ghana has charged its own customs officers. Liberia’s police chief has named his own officers. Each response has been national, quiet, and separate. None has yet matched the scale of a network that treats the whole coastline as a single market. This editorial argues that unless ECOWAS states build real, shared instruments — intelligence-sharing with teeth, vetted port personnel, extradition that actually works, a joint task force built around networks rather than individual shipments — the region will keep discovering Leijdekkers-style operations one country at a time, always a step behind. The stakes go beyond narcotics: a coastline that cannot secure its ports against traffickers will struggle to secure them against anything else.

ONE MAN’S SHADOW now falls across an entire coastline. From Freetown, where Jos Leijdekkers is reported to be sheltering, to Tema, where his associates allegedly bought their way past a customs scanner, to a Liberian beach where police officers allegedly stood watch over a cocaine landing for $5,000 apiece — the footprints of a single fugitive trafficker keep turning up wherever West Africa’s ports and patrols prove for sale. That is not a coincidence. It is a diagnosis.

WHAT THE DUNKIRK CASE EXPOSED in Ghana, and what Inspector General Gregory Coleman has alleged in Liberia, are not isolated failures of two governments. They are the same failure, wearing two flags. A network built around one man has been able to move tonnes of cocaine through this region not because West African security services lack the will to stop him, but because he has found, again and again, the one official in the one office willing to look away for a price. Every country that has now stumbled onto a piece of his operation — Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone — has treated it as a national embarrassment to be managed quietly, prosecuted separately, and closed. None has yet treated it as what it actually is: evidence of a single, regional criminal architecture that respects no border, because the men running it long ago stopped respecting ours.

THAT HAS TO CHANGE, and it has to change now.

A Threat That Does Not Recognize Borders

LEIJDEKKERS’ NETWORK did not need a visa to move between Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Liberia. It needed a bent scanner operator in one port and a police escort in another. Eastern European operatives tied to his associates have reportedly been slipping into Liberia on Ghanaian passports since at least 2021; one suspect now in Liberian custody was arrested in Accra at Liberia’s own request — and then simply vanished. That single episode is the whole regional problem in miniature: a request for cooperation was honored on paper and defeated in practice, because no mechanism exists to make an arrest in one West African capital actually stick by the time it matters in another.

MEANWHILE THE SEIZURE numbers, taken country by country, look like separate stories: Ghana’s cocaine hidden in gari sacks and container irregularities, Liberia’s $317 million bust in Duazon and its $19 million interception at Roberts International, Sierra Leone’s cocaine-stuffed suitcases out of Freetown, Nigeria’s opioids in bread and speakers, Cabo Verde’s swallowed capsules. Read individually, each is a national success story — an arrest made, a shipment stopped. Read together, across a single June-to-September stretch, they describe a trafficking corridor running the length of the West African coast, probing every port and every patrol for the weakest link. Traffickers already treat this region as one market. It is well past time our governments did too.

What Cooperation Actually Requires

GHANA’S PRESIDENCY has ordered inter-agency investigations and restored its narcotics agency’s mandatory role in screening port cargo. Liberia’s Inspector General has named officers he says took bribes to escort a shipment. These are necessary steps, and each government deserves credit for taking them. But a scanner fixed in Tema and an internal police probe in Monrovia will not stop a network that simply moves its business to the next weak port down the coast. What this moment calls for is not two governments cleaning house separately. It is ECOWAS states finally building the shared instruments they have spent years discussing and never finishing:

A REGIONAL INTELLIGENCE-SHARING arrangement with teeth — not another memorandum of understanding, but a standing mechanism through which a customs flag in Tema, a police tip in Monrovia, and an airport seizure in Praia are treated as one file, not three.

VETTING AND ROTATION of port and customs personnel with regional oversight, so that a scanner operator’s login cannot become, as prosecutors allege happened in Ghana, a key that a trafficking network simply buys.

EXTRADITION AND MUTUAL legal assistance agreements that actually function under pressure — so that an arrest made at a neighbor’s request, as Ghana made of a suspect wanted in Liberia, does not end in a suspect who “reportedly vanished” before he can be handed over.

A JOINT TASK FORCE tracking networks, not just shipments — built to follow people like Leijdekkers and his associates across the borders they cross freely, rather than waiting for each country to rediscover the same names independently.

NONE OF THIS IS EXOTIC. Regional bodies elsewhere have built exactly these tools. What West Africa has lacked is not the blueprint but the political will to treat trafficking as a shared emergency rather than each nation’s private scandal.

The Region’s Future Is What Is Actually at Stake

IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE to see this only as a drug story. Every scanner that gets overridden for cash, every police escort sold for $5,000, is a small transaction that adds up to something much larger: a generation of West African institutions being hollowed out from the inside, one bribed official at a time. Money on this scale does not stop at corrupting a customs post. It buys judges, financiers elections, and arms the same criminal networks it enriches. A region that cannot secure its own ports and highways against traffickers will find it just as hard to secure them against anything else.

JOS LEIJDEKKERS WILL eventually be caught, or he will not; that is, in the end, a matter for Dutch, Sierra Leonean and Interpol investigators. But whether West Africa produces the next Leijdekkers-scale network, and whether it takes years or weeks to unravel next time, is entirely within this region’s own hands. Liberia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and their neighbors have now each been handed unmistakable proof that their ports, their patrols and their own officials are being tested for weaknesses by organized crime on an industrial scale. The only responsible answer is to close that gap together, before the next shipment — and the next bribe — finds it first. The choice in front of West Africa’s governments is not complicated. Cooperate now, or explain later why they didn’t.