Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi
speaker
93 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In June, there was a march in Liberia's capital of Monrovia, and the government's goal was to make it visible that they're cracking down on drug abuse and the broader trafficking of narcotics throughout the West African country.
Just a few weeks ago, police raided a bungalow in between the country's main airport and the capital, and they found hundreds of suitcase-sized packages of cocaine stacked up to the ceiling.
Put together, the entire haul was worth over $300 million.
It's not the first big bust that Liberia or even West Africa has seen this year.
In May, a ship was intercepted off the coast of the Western Sahara, carrying nearly 31 tons of cocaine, more than the total amount of the drug seized in West Africa in the whole of 2025.
Because of Africa's location as a midpoint between South America, where most of the world's cocaine is produced, and Europe, where a lot of the global market is, it's been a convenient trafficking point for many decades.
But in recent years, there's been more and more cocaine traffic through this part of the world,
partly because the police in Europe are cracking down on the packages that are coming directly from South America.
And so cartels are getting really innovative and circumventing them by coming through West Africa instead.
Their shipments are getting harder to intercept, and that's becoming a really big problem.
West Africa as a whole has now become one of the biggest hubs for cocaine flows to Europe.
So talking numbers, between 2019 and 2025, the volume of cocaine seized has gone up by 50% each year.
And the size of these shipments have gotten bigger as well.
So in 2025, the average haul weighed over five tons.
That's more than twice the weight of the previous year.
The traffickers are bulk shipping this cocaine to West Africa, where the ports and the airports are much more lax.
Shipments are getting repackaged there and then loaded onto these massive ships called mother vessels.
The mother vessels hover around the high seas, around North Africa, the Canary Islands, and they're met there by smaller boats, really fast boats called go-fasts.
And in the middle of the high seas, they're transferred from these mother vessels to the gophars and sent straight to Europe, sometimes bypassing the major ports entirely and going to private jetties.
So I spoke to Paolo Silva from the EU's Maritime Analysis and Information Centre, which is a multinational enforcement body that's based in Europe and looking into this.
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