Narcotic business challenges stability

Page 28: February 7, 2008.
Story: Albert K. Salia
THE head of Conflict Prevention Management and Resolution Department (CPMRD) of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, Dr Kwesi Aning, has stated that the greatest challenge to Ghana’s stability is the narcotic business.
He said the drug problem had undermined the reputation of the country in the last 15 years, and that increasingly the name Ghana was becoming synonymous with the drug trade.
According to him, it had become so because there had not been any serious operational response and also those in authority were unwilling to combat the menace.
Speaking in an interview following the arrest of a nine-member Ghanaian crew on board a shipload of 2.5 tonnes of cocaine in Liberian waters by a French navy at the weekend, Dr Aning indicated that even the rhetorical responses of the political authority had not been serious.
“Although we have security agencies, these institutions do not understand the dynamics of drugs and Ghana’s reputation in it,” he said.
Dr Aning said until the country began to see the drug trade as the new frontier for Ghana’s survival and responded to it as it did to the HIV/AIDS pandemic by having a national strategy and a concerted effort to deal with it, “we will never scratch the surface of the threat posed by the drug menace”.
He said if recent occurrences were anything to go by, then one would be right to conclude that there was no inter-agency collaboration at all but a fight for bureaucratic supremacy among the institutions that should be fighting the drug trade.
According to him, even more disturbing was the fact that instead of the fight against narcotics being an intelligence-led operation, it had become reactive.
Dr Aning noted that it was sad that the profits of drug trafficking was impacting so much on public institutions and community relations that it was no more shameful to be tagged a drug lord or agent because of the welfare role they played in society.
He said the way and manner public sector institutions, especially the police and the judiciary, were beginning to lose credibility was enough to send signals that all was not well with our fight against drugs.
“The picture that one gets is a country that is passive, its institutions totally directionless and its social values totally compromised,” he lamented.
Dr Aning said the weaknesses of the system and the non-seriousness shown in the fight against narcotics was the inability of the state to trace the information leaks that led to MV Jano escaping and the missing 77 parcels on board the MV Benjamin.
According to him, all these indicated that the agencies had been infiltrated by the drug lords as nothing was heard about MV Jano, no one punished for leaking the information and the budgetary allocation of no agency was cut, stressing that “the response mechanism to deal with such lapses is simply non-existent”.
He said the problem would be better appreciated if one was to compare the income levels of security personnel and the property they had acquired over a period.
Dr Aning said the problem had also been compounded by the fact that there had not been enough political will in fighting the drug menace.
He said although there had been public discourse and declaration in fighting the menace, private discourse between people in authority and law enforcement officers showed that the security personnel were prevented from doing their work.
“Although they can disobey the orders, they do so at their own peril. They will lose their jobs,” he said.
“What we are seeing now is more of a systemic infiltration of the country and not an individual problem,” he added.
Dr Aning said it was because of such failures and weaknesses that the foreign partners had decided to ward off the drug trade by guarding their waters and the West African coast from use by the drug lords.
He suggested that targets should be set for security institutions to deal with the problem and the government should be ready to hire and fire and people found to be connected in drug business should be imprisoned if need be.
He also called for a legislation to empower the security agencies to deal drastically with drug dealers when caught so as to send strong signals that the country was serious about its commitment to dealing with the problem.
He urged churches and traditional leaders to declare a month each year for public education on drugs.
According to him, while people, including churches and chiefs, were currently adoring wealth and commending people for building schools and other projects for them, if they did not question the source of the funds, the country would begin to reap the rewards of the drug business in the next 10 years.
“Already, the outline is there for all to see. The use of macho men and drug addicts everywhere would be worse,” he said, adding that if nothing was done the country that everyone cherished as a stable and peaceful one would be dominated by gangsterism, drug addicts, among others.