Nigeria is currently finalising the document that will shape its drug policy for the next five years. The fifth National Drug Control Master Plan (NDCMP), covering 2026 to 2030, is expected to be published imminently. It will determine how the country’s 14.3 million people who use drugs live, face law enforcement, and possibly receive meaningful harm reduction services.
“If you know the history of drugs in Nigeria, you wouldn’t believe that we would be doing harm reduction,” Chinwike Okereke, founder and chief executive of the African Law Foundation (AFRILAW), told TalkingDrugs.
For decades, Nigeria’s drug laws have been built on colonial-era prohibition, military decree, and intense custodial sentencing. But that’s beginning to change as the new plan attempts to build upon the roots of harm reduction systems established over the past few years.
“The reform has come,” according to Okereke. “We’re not going back again.”
But some of the people who built that harm reduction infrastructure say they’ve been systematically removed from the process of creating the national plan, despite a supposed emphasis on stakeholder engagement. Several workers in reform-centric civil society organisations told TalkingDrugs that they were unceremoniously axed from policy discussions with little to no explanation.
“We’ve been totally cut out,” one community worker said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I don’t know what happened. At first they said we were welcome in, and then we were removed.”
And so a new era may be dawning for Nigeria’s drug policy, one with harm reduction given a crucial role. But with certain civil society actors excluded from the process and the plan’s drafting shrouded in secrecy, concerns remain about what path the country will walk.
Here’s the plan
Nigeria’s new master drugs plan is genuinely ambitious, according to draft documents obtained by TalkingDrugs. Its most significant changes for Nigeria’s drug-using community sit within the plan’s Demand Reduction Pillar. Here, the most ambitious harm reduction programme Nigeria has ever put its name to is spelled out in eight specific intentions:
- Needle and Syringe Programmes (NSP) to reduce unsafe injections.
- Medication-Assisted Treatment and other evidence-based treatment options.
- Supervised community distribution of Naloxone for overdose management.
- HIV Testing Services and linkage to Antiretroviral Therapy.
- Prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and condom distribution for people who inject drugs (PWID) and their partners.
- Targeted Information, Education and Communication (IEC) campaigns to raise awareness among PWID.
- Prevention, vaccination, diagnosis, and treatment for viral hepatitis.
- Prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of tuberculosis.
All of these programmes are intended to be rolled out across all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones, according to the documents. This isn’t quite the same thing as having them in every state, of which there are 36. Regardless, nationwide rollout will be a monumental task for these services, considering their current nascent state. NSP programmes, for example, currently operate in just 11 states, having grown significantly from three pilots that broke ground in 2020. Those tests achieved “significant and tangible results,” according to Henry Okiwu, an advocacy manager with Nigerian youth empowerment organisation YouthRISE Nigeria.
Whilst the plan’s ambition was welcomed by harm reduction organisations, some believe that what’s missing is a shift in Nigeria’s regulations that govern drugs in the first place. “What we want is to have a legal framework to support harm reduction in Nigeria,” said Okiwu.
The document concurs, admitting to a “gross deficiency of policies and legal frameworks” underpinning most of Nigeria’s drug, demand, and rehabilitation services, and committing to developing them. AFRILAW is playing a part in that development, helping create a new National Threshold Policy, which sets out quantities meant to separate drug users from drug dealers. Currently, the two are indistinguishable in the eyes of the law.
Not in the room
Nigeria’s outgoing 2021–2025 strategy was lauded as a collaborative endeavour between government and civil society organisations. But the government’s own evaluators found that a drafting workshop for the new plan, held in October 2025, was actually the first time any consultative forum had been convened. It seems there was little or no contact with reform organisations during the previous plan’s cycle, despite specific provisions to the contrary.
This time around, it’s a little better, with the aforementioned consultation and another forum taking place this year. Official accounts of both events name the EU, UNODC and ECOWAS as partners. These are big names, but they may hide some noticeable absences.
“The process has become completely opaque,” a policy coordinator with a Nigerian harm reduction organisation said. “We’ve been sidelined. They have brought foreigners, but removed us Nigerians. Without us, how will they produce something in our interest?”
One community worker put it bluntly: “If we’re not the ones in the room, I worry who is.”
Such warnings about the plan’s drafting haven’t only come from the outside. UNODC country representative Cheikh Touré used his address to the May forum to call for stronger community-based participation, telling officials that drug policy cannot be achieved “from the centre alone.”
Okereke defended the process, though never claimed it was perfect. He insists key drug-policy networks, including his own, were consulted, as was the drug-user-led network Drug Harm Reduction Advocacy Network Nigeria (DHRAN). Those excluded, he suggests, were groups not running Global Fund-financed projects.
But civil society groups are used to exclusion, and they’re not taking it lying down. “We are reformers. They are not always pleased to work with u,.” Okiwu said. “But we find a way in. We find a way to get our agenda in front of the right people.”
Promises on paper
Nigeria is no stranger to promises of drug policy reform. The outgoing master plan also named harm reduction as a strategic pillar, but it was barely funded. Only 15% of the rehabilitation centres planned under the cycle ever became functional. Fewer than 60 facilities nationwide currently provide drug dependence treatment, aside from 11 run by the UN.
In the absence of government programmes, peer-led naloxone distribution run by YouthRISE Nigeria in Benue State cut opioid overdose deaths by 25% between 2020 and 2022.
“It would be unfair to say that the government doesn’t provide support,” said to Okiwu, “but we do the work on the ground, and it’s the Global Fund that provides the finances.”
Finances are a crucial issue here. The vast majority of Nigeria’s harm reduction funding comes from the Global Fund, the international partnership funding HIV and TB-related care around the world, making it vulnerable to the kind of sudden donor loss which proved calamitous in other African nations. The new plan will aim for a dedicated domestic budget for harm reduction at the national level and in at least 50% of states, according to the documents, but it’s an aim, not a guarantee. For now, Nigeria’s harm reduction will remain donor-led, and funded partly by seized criminal assets, which the government does seem eager to claim.
The question of what happens next for Nigeria is one that harm reduction organisations are best equipped to answer. And yet, despite the genuine optimism among some campaigners, others are being removed from the process altogether.
Other African nations are attempting to build upon their harm reduction legacies, or even seeing the rise of decriminalisation coalitions. In Nigeria, whether the next five years close the gap between what the plan promises and what’s delivered may depend in large part on who was, and wasn’t, in the room where it was written.
