The tanker, marked MKA 960 XC, had reportedly been flagged down by National Drug Law Enforcement Agency officers before the driver refused to stop and abandoned the vehicle at a church premises in Ugbe Akoko, then fled into the surrounding bush, according to NDLEA Director of Media and Publicity Femi Babafemi.
Operatives who searched the abandoned vehicle found 165 bags of cannabis packed inside a concealed compartment built within the tanker body. The drugs, totalling 2,145 kg, were hidden alongside legitimate fuel cargo reportedly destined for Jos, Plateau State, suggesting the operator had blended the illicit shipment with a functional commercial delivery to reduce suspicion at checkpoints.
Babafemi, in a statement released Sunday, confirmed the tanker had previously evaded arrest in earlier NDLEA operations, making Friday’s interception a notable outcome of the agency’s intelligence-tracking process across known trafficking routes in the country.
The Ondo seizure was not an isolated operation. Coordinated NDLEA crackdowns spanning Lagos, Adamawa, Kaduna, Bauchi, Ekiti, Kogi, Taraba, and Enugu ran simultaneously, recovering cannabis, tramadol, methamphetamine, codeine, and other controlled substances from multiple suspects and vehicles.
In Lagos, operatives at the port recovered 966,200 tablets of Tramadol 225 mg, valued at more than N1.1 billion, concealed inside 21 cartons of thrift trousers shipped from Pakistan. The consignment gave no visible indication of any pharmaceutical cargo at the point of entry.
Also at Lagos ports, 57.80 kg of Loud, a synthetic cannabis strain valued at more than N173 million, arrived from Singapore. At the Tincan Port, a 40-foot container yielded 598.08 kg of cannabis-laced cookies and gummies across 890 packets, linked to an earlier seizure of 842.54 kg of similar products.
Adamawa State produced two separate recoveries. From a residence connected to a fleeing suspect, operatives recovered 864,000 opioid pills, specifically tramadol. A second operation in Michika, the same state, produced 2 kg of methamphetamine, Babafemi confirmed.
In Kogi State, 636 kg of cannabis was found concealed inside chicken manure aboard a bus travelling the Okene/Lokoja highway from Ondo State toward Jos. The concealment method, Babafemi said, was consistent with traffickers adopting disguise strategies to bypass routine checks at inter-state stops.
Kaduna State officers intercepted a truck loaded with bags of cement along the Zaria-Kano Expressway. Behind the cement bags, operatives found 1,179 kg of skunk. In Ekiti, a four-hectare cannabis farm was destroyed in the Efon-Alaaye forest, with 117 kg of already-harvested skunk also recovered on site.
Taraba State yielded more than 109 kg of assorted controlled substances from a single vehicle travelling from Onitsha, Anambra State, to Yola, Adamawa State. The substances included tramadol, diazepam, pentazocine, phenobarbital, nitrazepam, bromazepam, and pregabalin, all scheduled under Nigerian drug control law.
Enugu rounded out the weekend sweep. At Ugbema Junction, NDLEA officers intercepted a vehicle and recovered 40,590 capsules of tramadol during a routine stop on a major interstate route connecting southeast and north-central Nigeria.
NDLEA Chairman Brig. Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa commended officers involved across all nine states and told them to sustain what he described as a balanced approach to drug control, one combining enforcement with prevention, at a briefing Sunday.
Marwa said traffickers using new identities, legitimate business fronts, or sophisticated concealment methods would continue to be tracked. The fuel tanker case, his office noted, illustrated how deeply concealment methods had evolved beyond common packaging into the structural body of commercial vehicles, representing a significant escalation in the lengths to which trafficking networks will go to protect high-volume shipments from detection.
The weekend operations extend a pattern of large-scale NDLEA cannabis seizures in which commercial transport routes, port cargo channels, and remote farmland in Nigeria’s forest zones have repeatedly served as the primary infrastructure for moving controlled substances at scale.
