West Africa: The Ghanaian Narcotics Control Board

By on December 16, 2010

The NACOB Executive Secretary, Yaw Akrasi Sarpong declared that he had complained about the lack of effective narcotics enforcement in neighbouring countries.

The Executive Secretary noted that Ghana’s difficulty in effectively preventing the inflow of drugs across its land borders highlights the regional nature of drug trafficking in West Africa, as well as the serious shortcomings in the police capabilities in Ghana’s three neighbours. Sarpong said that if his office arranged for a controlled drop in Cote d’Ivoire, the drugs would quickly wind up back in Ghana. Drugs originating in Guinea could travel through Mali and Burkina Faso and enter Ghana from the north “and no one would stop them. Sarpong also questioned how a 700,000 US dollars’ mansions could be built in the poor region adjacent to the main Ghana-Togo border crossing or how a single Nigerian woman could buy large parcels of beach front property and no one questions the source of her funds. However, Sarpong was not endorsing all the situation to the neighbouring countries, but he also declared that the  ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the government have failed so far to provide NACOB with adequate resources, and stressed that “low salaries make law enforcement personnel highly vulnerable to drug traffickers”.

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