There is a moment, in the unravelling of any country’s institutional integrity, when the rot stops being invisible. When it surfaces not in quiet whispers or leaked memos but in seven suitcases of cocaine found inside a diplomatic vehicle crossing the border into Guinea. That moment arrived for Sierra Leone in January 2025, and the world has not looked away since.
A new global ranking by StatiSense of cocaine trade activity places Sierra Leone among the top five countries on the African continent, scoring 7.5 out of 10 alongside Nigeria, South Africa, Guinea, and The Gambia. Only Guinea-Bissau, the region’s most entrenched narco-state, scored higher, with an 8.5 that puts it in a category of its own. But what the numbers alone cannot tell you is the story behind Sierra Leone’s position a story that stretches from the fishing communities of the Freetown Peninsula to the corridors of a state that appears, by multiple credible accounts, to have offered shelter to some of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers.
For a country still carrying the scars of civil war, still wrestling with one of the world’s lowest human development indices, and still declaring national emergencies over the devastation of a synthetic drug called Kush, a score of 7.5 in the global cocaine trade is not merely a statistic. It is an indictment.
Sierra Leone has emerged as a key logistics and redistribution hub for cocaine trafficking in West Africa, with shipments frequently traced to Europe, particularly Antwerp and Brussels. Cocaine traffickers primarily use maritime routes, with inbound flows typically uncontainerised carried on fishing vessels, pleasure craft, or bulk cargo vessels, often being trans-shipped in the Gulf of Guinea and disembarked along the country’s porous coastline.
The scale of what passes through Sierra Leone’s waters and ports is staggering. In 2024, Belgian authorities traced the second-largest cocaine shipment entering their ports to Sierra Leone, seizing six tonnes of the substance. A year earlier, the French Navy, working alongside agencies from Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, intercepted a Brazilian tugboat 400 miles off the Sierra Leone coast carrying over 4.6 tonnes of cocaine valued at approximately €150 million a consignment British authorities estimated could have generated more than £300 million in criminal profits on the UK market.
In one documented case, a Serbian-led network imported non-containerised cocaine from Brazil via a fishing vessel, containerised the drugs in Sierra Leone, then exported the consignment hidden among cocoa husks in a container bound for Antwerp, Belgium. The sophistication of the operation points to something far beyond opportunistic criminality. It points to infrastructure, to knowledge, and to protection.
Although there have been significant cocaine seizures linked to Sierra Leone abroad notably in the UK and Belgium no material seizures have been reported at Freetown Port in at least five years. Security analysts say this strongly suggests political protection involving customs officials and senior figures.
No single episode has crystallised the question of state complicity more sharply than the case of Jos Leijdekkers known in criminal circles as “Bolle Jos,” or Chubby Jos.
Leijdekkers is one of Europe’s most wanted fugitives. He was sentenced in absentia to 24 years in prison by a Rotterdam court for smuggling more than seven tonnes of cocaine. Dutch police have described him as one of the key players in international cocaine trafficking and said the 7,000 kilograms of confiscated cocaine behind his conviction were likely only a fraction of his actual business.
For several years, Leijdekkers moved through Freetown under the guise of a false name, successfully corrupting state power to make way for his cocaine-trafficking empire. His presence in Sierra Leone only became internationally known when images emerged of him at a New Year’s church service in the president’s hometown.
Photos and video shared by Dutch media showed a man identified as Leijdekkers attending the service in Tihun, a remote town in southwestern Sierra Leone sitting just rows behind President Julius Maada Bio and his family. Reuters verified the images and reported that Leijdekkers was sitting next to Bio’s daughter Agnes, with sources claiming she is married to the drug trafficker.
The Sierra Leonean government denied knowledge of Leijdekkers’ identity. But the Dutch prosecution service was unambiguous: securing his return was of the highest priority. A €200,000 reward the highest ever offered by Dutch prosecutors for a single fugitive was placed on tips leading to his arrest. As of 2025, Leijdekkers remains in Sierra Leone. Having weathered the media firestorm after his identification, he has no good reason to leave. Nor does the administration have any incentive to act, having successfully waited out the scandal.
The diplomatic fallout has not been confined to the Leijdekkers affair. On or about January 17, 2025, seven suitcases of suspected cocaine were discovered inside a Sierra Leone embassy vehicle crossing into Guinea, raising serious diplomatic and legal questions about official complicity in drug smuggling operations. Sierra Leone subsequently recalled its ambassador to Guinea.
The scandal deepened further when authorities in the United Arab Emirates arrested Abdullah Alp Üstün known as “Don Vito” and wanted by Interpol who was reportedly in possession of a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport. Üstün is the brother-in-law of Jos Leijdekkers. According to Turkish press reports, the diplomatic passport was obtained through the facilitation of Leijdekkers himself, who by that point had established deep social ties within Sierra Leone’s elite.
The convergence of these incidents a fugitive cocaine baron embedded within the presidential circle, cocaine-filled suitcases in embassy vehicles, a drug lord’s associate holding a Sierra Leonean diplomatic travel document does not suggest coincidence. It suggests a system.
Sierra Leone’s unprotected land and maritime borders are left open to smuggling due to minimal security and customs enforcement. There are hundreds of unauthorised land crossings and myriad unofficial coastal entry points, while bribery is commonplace even at official border posts. Criminal networks have infiltrated key infrastructure hubs, including Freetown Port and Lungi International Airport.
Corruption remains pervasive and is perceived to be growing, particularly in the health, education, and law enforcement sectors. Significant political protection is given to the cocaine trade. These are not the conclusions of opposition politicians or tabloid commentators. They are drawn from the Global Organized Crime Index one of the world’s most credible frameworks for assessing criminal market activity and state resilience.
One Freetown journalist described the situation with stark clarity: “Jos has corrupted the whole business community, the whole political community. And Sierra Leone is a very small country.”
The cocaine trade’s consequences do not stay at port level. They seep inward.
Crack cocaine is now among the most consumed drugs in Freetown, according to surveys of people who use drugs. Coastal communities report a growing trend of fishermen being approached to transport cocaine sometimes over 100 kilograms between domestic points or to neighbouring Guinea, with these movements predominantly coordinated by foreign actors.
This is where the abstraction of a 7.5 score becomes human. It is a fisherman from Tombo or Aberdeen, offered cash he has never seen before to carry something he may not fully understand. It is the port worker who looks the other way because the alternative is worse. It is the rehabilitation centre in Kissy, already overwhelmed by Kush casualties, now bracing for the secondary waves of a cocaine economy taking root. Analysts warn that the sheer profitability of the cocaine trade acts as a powerful corrupting influence, enabling elite capture and shifting the incentives of policymakers in ways that are extremely difficult to reverse.
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Sierra Leone did not arrive at a 7.5 overnight. The country’s geography its Atlantic coastline, its proximity to the Guinea corridor, its position as a natural waypoint between Latin America and Europe made it attractive to criminal networks long before the current crisis. But geography is not destiny. Guinea-Bissau’s 8.5 score is not primarily a function of coastline. It is a function of decades of institutional erosion, military entanglement with narco-networks, and the normalisation of state capture. The warning in Sierra Leone’s ranking is that it is moving in a direction that should terrify anyone who has watched that story unfold.
Two West African countries Liberia and Sierra Leone have now declared states of emergency over drug crises, a response previously reserved for wars and epidemics. Ministers from both countries attended a high-level dialogue on drug markets in Accra in late 2025, an acknowledgment that the challenge has outgrown domestic capacity.
Acknowledgment is necessary. But acknowledgment without accountability is theatre. Sierra Leone’s ranking in the cocaine trade is not a foreign problem landing on local shores. It has local architects, local protectors, and local victims. Until those three realities are confronted with equal seriousness in the courts, in the customs halls, and in the seat of executive power the number will not fall.
