Yesterday, I gave the SSS some credit for acting on a tipoff to search the contents of a shipping container at Apapa Port. The container turned out to be full of heavy weapons being smuggled into Nigeria.
Today, Business Day reports the container has been sitting at the Port since July 10, some 3.75 months ago.
Apparently the Nigerian Customs Service blocked clearance of the container because its paperwork was incomplete and rather obviously forged.
It has been there for nearly 4 months. Whatever evidence trail the authorities could have picked up has probably long gone cold. And while I know Nigerians are used to waiting forever for their containers to load, I am going to guess whoever "owned" these weapons has long since given up hope of getting them, and may even have imported a replacement batch through one of the other porous borders.
If there was even the slightest chance that the "owners" were still planning on coming back for it, the publicity surrounding the discovery has more or less killed it. It would have been interesting if we had had the sort of security agencies that could have given the "owners" the illusion that their container had been freed for clearance, only to then follow the goods back to whoever sent for them, before arresting a Big Fish whow can be leveraged to provide information on even bigger fish.
Alas, we have found some guns and rocket launchers that have been sitting at Apapa Port for four months ... and that is about all we will get out of it.
It does beg the question: Who tipped them off?
I don't want the person's identity revealed. I just wonder if it is someone with more information (and if so, is there any way we can get at that information without blowing the informant's cover) or if it was just a dock worker who had seen the container sitting for four months and thought to open it, perhaps to take a little of whatever was inside (in which case we are still stuck at Square One).
Amalgamation Day in Lagos, 1914
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