Things I'm learning from the Cables: Ghana has a cocaine problem.

My friend Baba running a planning session in
Northern Ghana--the "Africa" I know

I have a problem with writing about "Africa", because the "Africa" that hops into everyone's head at the mention of "Africa"--the kids with flies on their faces, disenfranchised starving women, the "land of rape and lions"--is less than 1/8th of the story. A great part of it is full of vibrant, incredible, hard-working people like you, with different accents and better looking bums.
I hate giving bad news about Africa.
But Cablegate being Cablegate, there's stuff I'm learning about it.

Ghana, the country I once called home, is in the Cables today--for drug smuggling operations, of all things. Apparently a UK-taxpayer funded anti-cocaine trafficking campaign is corrupt as hell, to the point that the Ghanaian Narcotics Control Board told traffickers when to travel to avoid detection, sabotaged drug scanners, and channelled folks suspected of carrying drugs (including their wives, pastors and bank managers) through VIP areas to avoid screening.

Apparently they've found packs of drugs taped to the bottom of seats on KLM flights (which sucks, because I loved my KLM trip)--and drug seizures drop to almost nothing when the UK side of the joint task force goes home.

Even President Atta Mills, who had fighting the trafficking problem in his election platform,  had thoughts that his entourage were smuggling coke. The US Embassy sums it up thusly:

"The government of Ghana does not provide the resources necessary to address the problem and, at times, does not appear to have the political will to go after the major drug barons."

from the Guardian, taken in Accra

Why is the UK involved in anti-trafficking initiatives in West Africa anyway? Well, because Latin American drug cartels have decided it's the route to get their wares into Europe since the crackdown on smuggling in the Carribean. Apparently they're not messing around, either: a plane that crashed into the desert of Mali that was suspected of being run by said cartels had enough space for 10 tonnes of cocaine.


Ghana's directly in the middle of the route, runs the most international traffic, and has an influx of new wealth from oil and investment that can mask and scale up drug operations revenue. And apparently, Ghana's already failed to use intelligence given to them to intercept a cocaine boat from South America in 2007.

Meanwhile, in the rest of West Africa, Sierra Leone is suspected of massive marijuana farming, to the point of the "cash crop" becoming detrimental to subsistence farming. Guinea's first lady's entourage is suspected to have protected a trafficker who moved 750kg of coke into Sierra Leone, who asked the US help in extraditing him. And back at that Malian plane crash, civil servants and the drug task force in place were prevented from investigating the site of the crash by the Secret Service for three weeks, and drug trafficking between rival Malian Tuaregs and Arabs is turning into a powder-keg for armed conflict.

When my host brother Goodman got frustrated with the system, he used to say "Africa, my Africa" and shake his head with a smile.