POLITICS
Exploiting Ghana as a quasi – Cocaine Omphalos, betrays the ignoble stamp of the NDC government
Beginning in 2006, assorted West African countries impounded extremely towering volumes of cocaine— measured in the hundreds and thousands of kilograms—in single hauls. These confiscations were often adventitious, stipulating that actual traffic was doubtlessly much steeper.
Cocaine scrams Venezuela, Colombia, and every nook and cranny in South America in shipping containers, on yachts, and by small planes and jets. South American mobilized criminal and militant groups commonly deliver bulk shipments to West African traffickers in Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea, and Guinea Bissau, countries that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) customarily characterizes as the sub region’s cocaine “hubs.”
The cocaine is then repackaged and migrated to neighboring countries before being transferred to syndicates in Europe, often composed of African expatriates, who man wholesale and retail sales. Appropriations in West Africa have eventuated in the arrests of African, South American, European, and other nationals.
While West Africa is the current locus of this activity, the continent as a whole is a quintessential transshipment center—poor with hampered oversight and fragile policing—making for a low-cost and low-peril environment.
Since Africa is not a producer or major consumer of cocaine, some hypothesize that, its domestic effects will be two – bit. Yet evidence of cocaine’s destabilizing impact is already emerging.
The assassinations of Guinea Bissau’s president and the head of the army in early 2009 were probably linked to cocaine transshipment. In January 2010, a senior officer of Guinea Bissau’s Presidential Security Service was collared in a narcotics sting, prompting senior military officials to publicly howl at the regular association of security personnel in cocaine transshipment.
The sheer value of the trade poses not only a menace to security but also real woes of buckling the region’s economy, investment flows, development, and steps toward democracy.
Having articulated this, Ghana is gauged as a steely antagonist to any gruff cocaine transactions. We have got a holistic tenets and precepts, which have made us inimical to such alien tentacle. The country has been an inveterate crusader against possession of drugs, including cocaine.
Even at first, whoever was caught to possess any illegal drug (s) was to encounter a stringent incarceration until March, 2020, where Parliament ordained the ‘Narcotics Control Commission Bill’ into law, for which, it has somewhat thinned and tailed off the grimness of it. But nonetheless, it has a penetrating retribution for the malefactors.
Under the new Narcotics Bill, a person who perpetrates the offence of ‘possession or control of a narcotic drug for use’ will weather civil, instead of criminal, penalties in the form of a fine. Imprisonment and the minimum 10-year sentence will be germane solely in the cases of those convicted of trafficking (that is – when someone is detected to be in ‘the proprietorship or oversight of a quantum of a narcotic drug in plethora of a quantity which can sagaciously be used by an individual in a day’).
Thus, if the oppidans of the country have been unmanned from partaking in such heinous exercise, why should we pave way for expatriates to optimize the country as a sabbatical transit for cocaine higglers ?
Haplessly, Ghana has turned out to be an innate avenue of cocaine holiday brusquely under John Mahama administration. It isn’t flabbergasted at all, because it was this same man, who enrolled himself into grossly monstrous ‘Airbus Bribery Scandal’ , whereby he traded the treasures of the country in the appeasement of his quenchless covetousness.
John Mahama and his appendants are itching to fully leverage all the proscribed instruments to materialize their nefarious programmes. But God being so heavenly, ‘ the mighty minority caucus ‘ nail their contrivances anytime. In the end, John Mahama and his breeds will falter and with that, Ghanaians shall be in epiphany about their depraved attitudes.
Source: Prof. Dinkum.
(The Buzzing Rapine Of Erudition)
E – mail : dinkumchoice@gmail.com
