The War on Drugs or the War on Youth? NDLEA’s Raids and the Target on Young Nigerians

On the evening of Saturday, October 25th, operatives of Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) stormed Proxy Nightclub in Victoria Island, Lagos, citing intelligence that a “drug party” was underway. By morning, more than a hundred guests — including Lagos socialite Mike Eze Nwalie Nwogu, popularly known as Pretty Mike – had been arrested. The NDLEA reported seizing “cartons of illicit substances,” including cannabis and laughing gas, from both attendees and the club’s storage area. The agency later described the raid as routine and in line with its standard operating procedures. Yet the images that followed told a different story: guests, none yet charged with any offence, paraded across national television as though conviction had already taken place.

It is difficult to see these spectacles as the simple enforcement of law. Rather, they are public performances of power and state control dressed up as moral discipline. The presumption of innocence, a constitutionally guaranteed right, is routinely discarded for the theatre of humiliation. In Nigeria, humiliation has long functioned as punishment, and state institutions have perfected it as a mode of governance. The NDLEA’s recent enthusiasm for raiding nightclubs and broadcasting “suspects” fits this pattern. Its much-touted “war on drugs” increasingly appears to be a war on youth, visibility, freedom, and the social spaces where they are expressed.

The agency’s evolution over the past decade is telling. What began as a mandate to curb narcotics trafficking has morphed into a campaign that now targets nightlife, campuses, and private homes. In 2022, NDLEA operatives broke into the home of singers Mohbad and Zinoleesky at midnight, arresting and handcuffing them on camera in a chaotic raid that yielded small amounts of cannabis and molly. A year earlier, skit maker De General was arrested in his Lekki residence for possession of a quantity of cannabis the court later deemed too insignificant for sentencing. In both cases, the NDLEA’s use of force and public shaming far exceeded the scale of the alleged crime, framing youth, expressiveness, and visibility as itself suspicious.

This tendency is not unique to the NDLEA. Across Nigeria’s law-enforcement landscape, the policing of youth has become an obsession. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) routinely storms university hostels at night, arresting students under vague accusations of cybercrime. Across the country, from Benin to Nasarrawa, protests have erupted against EFCC operatives who break into private student housing without warrants, confiscating phones and laptops in the name of fighting fraud. The Nigerian Police, through its now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), institutionalised this culture of profiling – detaining, extorting, and in many cases killing young Nigerians for the crime of appearing successful, ultimately leading to the monumental #ENDSARS movement of 2020.

Criminal profiling in Nigeria has metastasised into a form of social control. Young people who deviate from the overwhelmingly conservative societal norms; who dye their hair, wear piercings, or show any signs of living comfortably are branded prostitutes or “yahoo boys.” The aesthetic of youth has become shorthand for criminality. Even sections of the media and public discourse enable this thinking. When Zinoleesky and Mohbad were arrested, commentators on major news channels such as Arise News suggested their “lifestyle choices” had invited the harassment. This framing, couched in a patronizing moralistic tone, reflects a broader societal hostility toward young Nigerians who dare to appear comfortable in a country that expects them to be struggling. In Nigeria, youth itself has become probable cause.

The disdain did not emerge in a vacuum. In 2018, then President Muhammadu Buhari’s remark that many young Nigerians “do nothing” and expect free benefits from an oil-rich state crystallised an unwarranted narrative of laziness that has since shaped official and public attitudes. It validated a political culture that sees youth not as the nation’s asset but as its moral failing. This perception now bleeds into the operations of agencies like the NDLEA, transforming legitimate law enforcement into moral policing. The irony is that Nigeria’s youth are, by demographic and economic necessity, the country’s greatest resource. With a median age of 18 and over half the population under 30, the state’s hostility towards them is not only cruel but strategically self-defeating.

Economic precarity compounds the problem. High unemployment, weak infrastructure, and systemic corruption have forced millions of young Nigerians into prolonged adolescence. Those who manage to build careers in entertainment, tech, or creative industries — sectors largely sustained by youthful ingenuity — become easy targets for envy and suspicion. Instead of being celebrated as symbols of resilience, they are subjected to state harassment. The NDLEA’s intrusion into nightlife therefore speaks to a deep discomfort with youth autonomy and the spaces where it thrives.

Nightclubs occupy a symbolic place in this dynamic. They represent a rare form of public freedom in a society that often polices expression. For many young Nigerians, nightlife is not merely leisure; it is one of the few outlets through which they can reclaim joy, community, and visibility in a country that offers little else. The state, however, reads such spaces through a moral lens — sites of decadence in need of correction. By treating dance floors as potential crime scenes, the NDLEA has effectively criminalised leisure itself. If this pattern continues into the festive “Detty December” period, the chilling effect on nightlife, tourism, and creative economies will be profound. 

Beyond Lagos, the consequences of this policing logic are national. Public trust in institutions erodes when the law becomes a tool of humiliation. Those arrested in the Proxy raid will carry not only legal scars but reputational and psychological ones. The footage of their detention will circulate long after the NDLEA’s performative press statement fades. These spectacles feed the growing cynicism that drives young Nigerians to emigrate — the overwhelming sense that their government regards them not as private citizens but as threats.

The NDLEA’s campaign, framed as a war on drugs, has in practice become a war on youth. It criminalises the ordinary — how people dress, dance, and gather — and converts the presumption of innocence into a privilege few can afford. Rather than law enforcement, these unlawful raids and arrests constitute the policing of peaceful existence. As Nigeria edges toward another festive season under the shadow of such raids, the implications stretch far beyond nightclubs; a country that cannot trust its young people and will not afford them space to thrive cannot hope to thrive itself.