The Rising Subversion, Chaos & Insecurity in West Africa and the Sahel

Crime Convergence and Cross-Border Illicit Threats: AML/CFT Challenges, Corruptive Influence, and Linkages to International Markets

David M. Luna

Executive Director, ICAIE

Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU)

Legal Compass Series (Webinar)

Abuja, Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria

11 August 2026

Find my new insights from this morning’s Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) webinar in Nigeria on the rising subversion, chaos, and insecurity in West Africa and the Sahel across illicit economies, gray zones, and asymmetrical battlespaces.

Good morning, good afternoon.

Thank you General Counsel Felix Obiamalu for the warm introduction, and let me at this time applaud you, CEO Abubakar Bakari for your outstanding leadership as well as the whole NFIU team including your efforts within FATF, GIABA, Egmont; for the NFIU winning earlier this year the prestigious UNODC-World Bank-Egmont Group Stolen Asset Recovery (StAR) Initiative Award for exemplary financial crime investigations.

As a former diplomat, I enjoyed working closely with Nigeria and many other governments in Africa and the international community – including visits to Abuja, Lagos – to safeguard against cross-border threats posed by illicit trafficking networks.

Now that I am in the private sector, I believe that public-private partnerships and the sharing of information across sectors are equally important.

With your permission, I would like to provide some opening points and a few slides as an overview to help frame our discussion this afternoon.

I often talk a lot about crime convergence, having helped to draft one of the first U.S. national security policies on countering transnational organized crime through this prism; and this approach is something that I frequently encourage partners to examine more closely moving forward in their own strategies –to view today’s security landscapes through the lens of “criminal-threat convergence”.

Because the reality on the ground is that we can no longer simply focus on one type of criminality within illicit economies.

In a world of converging threats – where various threats collide to form a more potent mix of insecurity globally; each is individually dangerous but their sum represents a far greater threat across borders.

Thus, we need to see the threat environment more holistically – how corruption, illicit trade, and money laundering, for example, become threat multipliers.

Complicit facilitators enable an illicit space for criminals, terrorist groups, armed militia, gangs, and bandits alike to thrive; and exploit weaknesses in borders and institutions that imperil the collective security of all.

For example, we see such growing threats in Nigeria and West Africa as militants from the Sahel and bandit gangs are making inroads to southern and coastal areas, which is among the reasons that Nigerian President Tinubu in June 2026 approved the recruitment of 28,000 military personnel to strengthen its national security, and to confront convergence organized crime and violent insurgencies as major threats to Nigeria and the region.

Illicit economies expand as more bad actors and threat networks subvert institutions and governance systems for greater wealth and power and to finance greater chaos, insecurity, and instability.

Because illicit trafficking networks operate in the shadows of the global economy exploiting systemic vulnerabilities and porous borders, increasingly sophisticated and enterprising criminals are diversifying their portfolios in everything:

• from narcotics, people, and arms to counterfeits including fake medicines, illicit tobacco and alcohol goods;

• and increasingly, pillaged oil and natural resources from illicitly-mined gold to critical minerals and rare earth elements (REE), and environmentally-sensitive goods such as endangered wildlife, timber, and fish.

On the governance front, the proceeds of drug trafficking and other forms of illicit trafficking are fueling a dramatic increase in corruption and insecurity among the very institutions responsible for fighting crime. 

In Africa, as in other parts of the world, the collusion and complicity of some government officials with criminal networks have helped carve out an illicit trafficking corridor that stretches from the West African coast to the Horn of Africa, from North Africa south to the Gulf of Guinea.

For example, drug lords are able to incentivize ruling elites in West Africa to enable trafficking routes and transshipment points to move tons of cocaine, illicit goods, and contraband.

Moreover, when external authoritarian actors engage in malign influence and disinformation such as Russia’s state-controlled paramilitary expeditionary force – the Africa Corps – to foment chaos, distrust in democracy, and destabilization, already illicit spaces become criminalized and dangerous in places like Burkina Faso, Mali, and Nigeria.  In the past few years, such active measures have undermined law enforcement and security operations, and weakened partnerships with Western governments. 

In some cases, to safeguard their joint interests amid stiffer competition, criminal actors further build alliances with armed groups and militias. 

They also cut deals with even more corrupt officials as they expand their illicit markets to:

• shield their business criminal activities from official scrutiny; or

• to buy the security services to protect their convoys along the trans-continental illicit superhighways.

In some places the same traffickers have reinvested their dirty monies to become legitimate business leaders; and even entered politics, where they can work with others to hollow out state institutions, co-opt state security forces and, in effect, turn the state into a criminal enterprise, and bank roll their partners in crime.

So make no mistake, today illicit economies in the Sahel and West Africa are inter-linked criminalities across borders; and criminally-derived profits from the trafficking of illicit goods and contraband have a harmful influence on economic development, prosperity, and peace and security.

Nigeria and West African economies are also in sight for such a patchwork of criminals and threat networks.

This is why at ICAIE, partnering with many other international partners including with the OECD, Egmont Network of FIUs, UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), we invest a great deal of our energies to:

• map hubs of illicit trade, illicit trafficking routes, zones, and risk points, and the related convergence of criminals, gangs, violent extremists and terrorists, and corrupt ruling elites;

• help committed law enforcement partners to disrupt lucrative and linked-black markets that hurting communities in Africa, and beyond.

As emphasized earlier, in the Sahel and West Africa, drug cartels and other criminal networks continue to expand these illicit pathways and illicit markets across the continent and around the globe, weakening critical institutions and enforcement systems that exacerbate everyone’s security.

Today’s criminal networks employ the latest technological advances and use commercial jets, drones, fishing vessels, container ships, encryption communications, and digital technologies to move illicit goods and contraband and their massive profits.

How massive is the global illegal economy?

In 2025, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that the Global GDP was estimated to reach approximately $117 Trillion in nominal terms.

According to ICAIE’s own research in the past several years, the global illegal economy, consisting of an array of illicit markets and illicit financial flows, could account for 2–5% of global GDP, amounting to up to $6 trillion annually in 2025.

A staggering amount!

The lucrative multi trillion-dollar global illicit economy includes an array of cybercrimes as well as the smuggling and trafficking crimes including:

• Bribery: Significant portion upwards of $1 trillion
  • Narcotics Trafficking: $750 billion to $1 trillionCounterfeited and Pirated Products: Close to $500 billionHuman Trafficking/Forced Labor: $200 billion annually
  • Environmental Crime (illegal wildlife trade, logging, trade in CFCs, and toxic waste dumping): $91 to $258 billion
  • Illegal Cigarette Trade: $40 to $50 billion
  • Money Laundering: at least $3-6 trillion.

And in this region, tens of billions of dollars are derived from criminal activities in addition to drugs and counterfeits, including arms trafficking, the illicit trade in fuel and motorbikes, cattle rustling, kidnapping, extortion, and the illegal gold trade.

Extremist networks also engage in extortion and predatory taxation, levying forced “taxes” (zakat) on herders, transport operators, and local businesses, funding their operations before moving cash through regional networks, and continuing to finance chaos, insecurity and instability as bad actors and threat networks compete for illicit profits and territorial control.

This contributes to the weaponization of illicit activities and the protection of illicit economies, sustaining violent extremism.

In fact, according to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index, the Sahel accounts for 51% of global terrorism-related deaths. 

The region’s significant gold deposits and critical minerals draw global attention and facilitate illegal economies that thrive amid regional instability.

Such criminal activity robs states of billions in revenue to fund economic development and social sustainable programs, and a brighter future for communities.

In too many ungoverned spaces, violent extremist groups like Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), the Islamic State, and Boko Harem, step into governance vacuums to control territories, spur vicious cycles of violence, and engage in coordinated attacks of strategic infrastructure, economic markets, and commercial centers.

As rule of law and governance and market structures are weakened, criminality and terrorist-inspired chaos undermines state legitimacy.

Finally, recent coups and junta-led governments in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger reflect decades of national, regional and continental failures to address the drivers of corruption, crime, and violent extremism.

CONCLUDING POINTS:

I think FIUs can be decisive in breaking the corruptive influence and economic power of transnational criminal networks; and severing the powerful strategic alliances that form between TOC and other threat networks.

As threats emerge and criminal networks evolve in tactics and operations, one must adapt, innovate, and act decisively. Action beats reaction every time.

This is why I believe that partners in Nigeria and West Africa must develop anticipatory, actionable responses to counter transnational crime and converging threats including integrating precision intelligence and data overlays into military, economic and criminal operations and targeting, to put some hurt on adversarial command and control and cut off the financing and infrastructure that threat networks use to grow and sustain their efforts. 

Attacking their financial underpinnings is the center of gravity; stripping them of their illicit wealth; cutting off their access to the financial system and underground banking; exposing their criminal activities hidden behind legitimate fronts; and protecting strategic markets across the regions from criminal infiltration.

To defeat transnational criminal networks that pose the greatest threat to regional security entails targeting their infrastructure, their logistics, and depriving them of their enabling financial means.

It is a shared responsibility among trusted partners such as the network of FIUs, working with dedicated law enforcement, security agencies, the private sector and civil society groups by sharing information and using actionable intelligence to disrupt and prosecute the fight more robustly across all domains.

In essence, building international capacity, cooperation, and whole-of-society partnerships are vital to confront the complex challenges posed by organized crime and terrorism, developing resilient institutions that are capable of preventing and responding to cross-border security threats.  This is the message amplified by Ambassador Sala Enikanolaiye, Nigerian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, in recent days: a call for stronger regional cooperation to tackle cross-border crime, terrorism, and other threats.

Illicit economies expand as more bad actors and threat networks subvert institutions and governance systems for greater wealth and power and to finance greater chaos, insecurity, and instability.

Partners must continue to leverage all national economic, intelligence, and diplomatic powers – or what they call in the military a full spectrum dominance across all dimensions of the criminal-threat convergence battlespace and illicit economies.  Make it riskier, harder, and costlier for threat networks to do business within Africa, and externally, so that the bad guys are unable to effectively operate and profit from their criminalities.

Thank you.