How Dare America Accuse Ghana on Trafficking, Except Road Traffic!

In a couple of weeks time fuel prices will go up, the PURC may announce new utility prices and with no immediate hope of processing Ghana’s wet gas into fuel for electricity, the bills are likely to go up, as well. Parents, many of them unemployed, may have to find money from any means necessary to pay for their kids’ second term fees. Poverty, unemployment, road traffic, personal insecurity and all the old ills of our impoverished society remain either unresolved or worsening.

But, forget about the traffic to buy LPG gas, the traffic to work and back, the traffic to fill job vacancies, the traffic, generally, to getting anything fixed or done in Ghana. The one traffic that appears to excite media and political attention is drug trafficking.

If in doubt, just throw your mind back to 15th December, the same morning that Ghana produced first oil was when news broke on Wikileaks’ leaked US cables on Ghana and the drugs trade. This week, we have all stopped talking about oil, the possible economic impact of the 2011 budget, la Cote d’Ivoire crisis, and concentrated on drugs (not fake pharmaceuticals to which every Ghanaian is potentially exposed) and the discussions are not about how we can find solutions, especially for a country that neither produces nor competitively consumes cocaine, but about who had more political will than the other in fighting a war that can only be partially won.

How dare America or any of those major cocaine consuming nations accuse Ghana of lacking political will! Should we reduce their century-long inability to win their own publicised war on drugs (from prohibition to crack cocaine) to lack of political will of successive governments over there?

Approximately 36 million Americans aged 12 and older have tried cocaine at least once in their lifetime, according to a national survey, and about 2.1 million Americans are regular users. Drug enforcement personnel estimate that about 2,500 Americans every day try cocaine for the first time. More than 400,000 babies are born addicted to cocaine each year in the U.S. I guess that shows the level of their own political will. But, that would be too simplistic.

We, in West Africa, are caught up in a dangerously powerful dragnet of a cocaine triangle from South America to Europe. How best can we fight this and send the traffickers, at least, diverting from our shores? Or is political will merely measured in rhetorical decibels?

In 2008, nearly 50,000 kilos of cocaine (approximately $1.5 billion) were seized in the U.S. during drug arrests. The entire global drug trade is estimated to be bigger than the GDP of 88% of countries in the world! Besides, it is estimated that between 50-60% of the one million kilos of cocaine smuggled every year manage to pass through America’s superior detection systems at (over, beneath, through) their ports and borders onto their streets. So, has the political will of Obama or his predecessors been high on somnabulism?

In a discussion with Dr Bawumia last week, he said something I considered profound: “Gabby, I have studied the way we have been doing things in Ghana since independence and it’s very obvious that at best we seek to tackle problems not to resolve them. We don’t implement solutions.”

I had a scheduled meeting with him to discuss matters of national development. The meeting was late. I was coming from the Spintex Road to Osu, but had to divert through the East Legon tunnel to avoid the traffic at Accra Mall roundabout. It was not rush hour, yet it took me close to one hour to get through the tunnel.

The reason was simple. That important link tunnel, beneath the Tema-Accra motorway, is so narrow that it can only accommodate one-way traffic at a time. So some jobless youths have ‘employed’ themselves to direct the traffic each way.

As I waited impatiently in my air-conditioned vehicle, burning fuel, exhausting fumes, burning precious productive time just waiting to go through this narrow tunnel, it occurred to me why we are poor and how expensive poverty really is.

Since the 1990s when I started using that tunnel, I’ve seen it turned from a robber’s favourite spot to an ever-increasing road traffickers’ nightmare. I then thought to myself, ‘Have our planners sat down to measure the traffic flow and calculated how much that traffic costs the nation each day in loss production and revenue?’

And, have we measured that against how much it will cost us to fix it – I mean expand the tunnel for a two-way traffic? My rough estimate is that it may not cost more than 150,000 Ghana cedis (less than $100,000). So how come government after government after government has failed to fix this big problem requiring a small solution? I guess we are too poor to fix it.

Imagine what the delays in completing the Tetteh-Quarshie-Mallam Road, Tetteh-Quarshie-Pantang Road and Achimota-Pantang routes are costing Ghana’s economy and development. One of the main reasons why property prices in Cantonments, Labone and Ridge are so expensive is that we have been prevented from developing more of those areas outside of the city centre because of ever-deepening road traffic.

But, this begs two interconnected questions: (1) What would Accra traffic be like ten years from today – 2020? (2) Is it worth considering creating a new capital city?

In answering this two-fold question, there are wider issues to look at, as well. How can we best make our country small, in terms of socio-economic access and make it wider in terms of the areas of vibrant socio-economic activity? Is it not worth considering moving the political capital of Ghana to the geographical mid-belt of the country, say Kintampo or Sunyani, as a deliberate policy to stimulate economic activity in the north and other ignored but critical parts of the country, bring the country economically closer, while at the same time, expanding the areas of economic activity to cover a wider area of the country’s geography and people?

South Africa offers as a very interesting model, facilitated by the country’s constitutional arrangements. It has three capitals. Pretoria is the administrative capital, Cape Town is the legislative capital, and Blomfontein is the home of the judiciary. As the Federal Republic of Nigeria teaches us, the influence of Lagos as the commercial capital has not at all been adversely affected by the decision in December 1991 to move the political capital to Abuja. It has made a vast area of land that was hitherto of very little economic value become among the most valuable in the world, creating more wealth and expanding the socio-geographical reach of the nation’s wealth. Accra and the rest of Ghana, surely, can also benefit from such a future arrangement? But, certainly, not at the cost of creating Abuja!

Again, the Tema Development Corporation model teaches us that the state can profitably facilitate city development by acquiring large lots of land, service it, offer good title and sell it to private estate developers and individuals. We must begin to take critical, not necessarily popular, actions to make Greater Accra relevant to the future or else we would be left with no option but to take the more radical route of building a new capital, altogether.

This issue is crucial to the political concept, as recently espoused by Akufo-Addo, of creating a society of opportunities. The property owning democracy concept works on the basis that let us not focus on the size of the cake but rather on expanding the size of the wheat fields so that we can grow more, harvest more, have more flour to bake bigger cakes and make other flour-based foods.

On the Wikileak issue, a more constructive approach is how to deal with the old NACOB problems of lack of independence, under-resourced, under-staffed, under-paid, under-trained, under-motivated, under-regional-cooperation and under-achieving. We should not be taking any lessons from Americans or Europeans on political commitment to fighting the drug trade. If they care let them put their money where their leaks are.

The fact that our law enforcement agents are said to be compromised should only lead us to find solutions, Europe and the America continue to face such problems even today. Just last month, a trio of policemen and two lawyers were arrested in a series of huge drugs crackdowns around Spain, resulting in 1,400kilos of marijuana being seized in Marbella.

Research in a Florida showed that per capita drug trafficking arrests are greater among police than among the general population in Miami and/or Dade County. Just this month, Mexico, supported by more than a billion dollars from the US, scored another major success in the country’s bloody war against drug traffickers by arresting Enrique Lopez, a leading kingpin from the notorious Sinaloa cartel, based in the northern Mexico town of Chihuahua. Since 2006, Mexican authorities have been battling a spiralling wave of drug-related crime and murder that has killed more than 28,000 people and that has deployed some 50,000 troops across the country – more than half of our entire police force.

But, what is happening in Guatemala is what has happened in Africa in recent years, where its growing influence as a drug hub continues to cause integrity challenges for police officers. March this year, Guatemala's chief of national police and the country's top anti-drugs official were arrested over alleged links to drug trafficking. Their arrest was in connection with a cocaine theft in March 2009.

Guatemala is becoming an important transit point for illegal drugs moved north by Mexican trafficking cartels, in a bid to ensure safe supply lines following a crackdown launched by Mexico's President Felipe Calderon.

Recently, Guatemalan and US authorities, in a joint operation, seized a makeshift submarine loaded with 10 tonnes of cocaine with a US street value of $200m ($400m in Europe).

Two months ago, FBI agents in Puerto Rico, finally arrested 133 law enforcement officers (61 police officers, 12 prison guards, 2 US Army Officers and others) on drug trafficking and weapons smuggling charges as part of an effort to crack down on corruption in the U.S. Caribbean territory.

Let us not beat ourselves in our struggling efforts to combat the drug trade; conserve and concert efforts to beat the traffickers, instead. Let us work hard with the tools that matter, resources, cooperation and integrity but let no American or European say Ghana has no political will in a war that they themselves admit they can’t win. Fight we must.

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