Tobacco: Confronting Challenges of Smuggling and Illicit Trade

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.