It is not enviable for one’s country to be associated with hard drugs. Some countries wear that tag and no matter how hard they try to wean it, the more it sticks on their image.
Unfortunately for us as citizens of Ghana, we have had to contend with this sleaze business for a while now, the past year witnessing an uptick of cocaine and meth transiting through our ports.
From the so-called ‘emergency landed aircraft’ when lights went off at the then Kotoka International Airport, there has never been a letup. Consignments which were intercepted at their final destinations are those which have made the headlines in the media.
Others which successfully landed of course were not heard about, the movement of the stuff having gone according to plan and expectation. It is such successful movements which, it would seem, provides the impetus for the pushers to consider Ghana as a better transit location, the past year and half serving their interests largely, yet casting us in bad light in the international community.
If within a year a total of some $1 billion worth of cocaine passed through our ports, we can only imagine the quantum that would do so in the coming months.
From the emergency landed aircraft to the charcoal laden meth and now the latest bust in France, the so-called investigations announced following the bust have yielded nothing in terms of security value.
It takes the daring and well-connected to move such hard drugs through our ports, which is why watchers of the hard drug underworld are demanding effective enquiries into the matter even as they doubt the outcome.
The previous busts, not on our shores, but in distant lands – their final destinations, made the headlines and after a while evaporated from the media space, the announced investigations having become cold.
Like the previous ones, the latest shall get cold.
Suspects identified and being quizzed are all part of the game-plan to eventually kill the case, is the suspicion of many, after all, such investigations are open-ended.
The Colombia’s Pablo Escobar should be proud of Ghana for being an accessory to the movement of the prized yet dangerous commodity.
It will be interesting to find out the ranking of Ghana in the transitory of hard drugs given the recent busts of narcotics passing through our ports.
The Presidency has ordered some office holders whose terms of reference include border security inter alia to come for a meeting on the subject, but missing is the Interior Minister who has oversight charge over the Narcotics Control Commission.
Unfortunately, like other Ghanaians, we doubt if the conference as it were would lead to the adoption of effective means of shedding off the country’s drug transit tag. The gadgets and procedures for combating the movement of hard drugs are in place at the ports, but what is absent is the ability to resist the temptation to take money or use positions to influence the drug transit to distant lands.