By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I have read quite a handful of articles on the latest “NDC Cocaine Saga,” as some observers and critics prefer to dub it, and could not find any satisfactory and/or suitable title for it, and so I decided to caption this write-up “The MV Atta-Mills.” The allusion here, of course, is unmistakable, although the title is more predicated on the moral thrust of the issue rather than the quantities of forensically ascertained cocaine involved.
Anyway, we are told that the “NDC Cocaine Saga” involves a female suspect by the name of Nana Ama Martin who was arrested about the same time that former President John Agyekum-Kufuor was preparing to relinquish the reins of governance; that was, of course, about the same time that a ship loaded with nearly eighty, or so, bags of cocaine was reportedly intercepted in Ghana’s territorial waters, if memory serves this writer accurately.
In the MV Benjamin saga, as the ship involved was called, several bags of cocaine reportedly went missing, after a considerable amount of the same had been deliberately and safely handed over for police custody. And if memory also serves us right, in that instance too, a specified quantity of the contraband substance was alleged to have mysteriously either morphed or been converted into cassava powder, otherwise known in our local vernacular as “Kokonte.”
Well, what makes the “NDC Cocaine Saga” rather fascinating inheres, of course, in the fact of its temporal nexus – or linkage – with that of the MV Benjamin, which almost irreparably dented the image and reputation of the entire Ghanaian police establishment. And so, naturally, it comes as hardly any surprise that the police should be fiercely defending its professional integrity before the court of national public opinion.
The problem here, however, is that the alleged tampering of the evidence in the latest cocaine saga could just well have occurred about the same time as the MV Benjamin saga, which makes it quite a bit tricky and may also well impugn the credibility of the presiding Accra Circuit Court judge, Mr. Eric Kyei-Baffuor. And here also must be quickly pointed out the fact that I am not, in any way, making a case against the integrity of Mr. Kyei-Baffuor, as such. Rather, I am attempting to contingently speculate on other quite plausible ways of viewing the latest “NDC Cocaine Saga.”
I must also hasten to warn any key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) who may be prematurely tempted to feel “one-uppy” over this case that its thematic connection with the MV Benjamin saga is rather too close and dangerously cold for comfort. What is indisputably clear here, however, is that three years of high-and-mighty rule of the Mills-led National Democratic Congress has done pretty little, if at all, to enhance the quality of the way and manner in which forensic evidence is collected and stored for effective judicial prosecution.
What is also clear is the fact that it took unacceptably too long for a case that could have been expeditiously disposed of by the Fast-Track judicial system to get to the bench, as it were. And such unsavory display of lassitude may well have provided the anonymous criminal fraudsters involved, temporally, with exactly what the proverbial doctor ordered. There is, of course, quite a great possibility of the criminal suspect, Nana Ama Martin, having either “congressionally” or financially paid her way, unscathed, through the at once flagrantly debilitating and unhealthily snail-paced and diffuse Ghanaian judicial system. That the suspect jumped bail, ought not to have been allowed to obstruct judicial proceedings, as has already been indicated by several observers and critics. Trial in absentia is not a new phenomenon to the Ghanaian judicial system. And so it would not be altogether outlandish for the investigative antennae of both Chief Justice Georgina Wood and the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) to veer this way.
That on December 13, 2011, by some media accounts, Ghanaians awoke to the rather flabbergasting news of the practical possibility of the known chemical properties of the drug cocaine suavely morphing into Sodium Bicarbonate, or Baking Soda, is an epic national contretemps which the Mills-Mahama government would do the country and its citizenry a lot of good not to pass off to the global community as a freshly discovered scientific truth, a renowned criminologist, lawyer, professor and schoolmate of mine from Okwawu-Nkwatia’s St. Peter’s Secondary School (PERSCO), recently had occasion to admonish his fellow countrymen and women.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Selected Political Writings” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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