Former Minister for Lands and Natural Resources Inusah Fuseini has questioned the usefulness of Parliament leading an investigation into Ghana’s narcotics problem, saying intelligence agencies are better placed to identify how the consignments moved through the country.
Fuseini said he had little confidence that Parliament could completely separate the issue from partisan politics.
“I have zero trust in Parliament because they have not demonstrated to me that they can insulate themselves from partisan political considerations when they are dealing with national issues,” he said on Keypoints on TV3.
He said the drug issue was unlikely to be treated differently.
“They have never demonstrated that to me. And I do not think that the drug issue will change the situation,” he added.
Fuseini therefore questioned whether calling Parliament to investigate the matter would produce the kind of intelligence needed to uncover the people behind the shipments.
“That’s why I have said that it should be a useless waste of time to call Parliament,” he said.
Instead, he wants the intelligence agencies to begin by examining the institutions responsible for preventing prohibited goods from passing through Ghana’s entry points.
Speaking on TV3’s The KeyPoints, Fuseini used the example of a house being robbed to explain where investigators should first look.
“When you have your house and there’s theft in your house, the first suspect, if you have a watchman, is the watchman,” he said.
He said Ghana had its own “gatekeepers” whose job was to prevent drug consignments from moving through the country.
“So we have gatekeepers who are not supposed to allow those things to pass. Never mind that those things pass. What was their role in allowing those things to pass?” he asked.
For Fuseini, the immediate task should be to establish what happened at the points where the drugs entered, moved through or were cleared.
He said investigators should determine whether the failure was caused by negligence, intelligence gaps or deliberate assistance by individuals within the system.
Fuseini also rejected the idea that political pressure should determine how the investigation is handled.
He said the objective should be to understand how the drug networks operate and identify the people facilitating their activities.
The former minister said Ghana would struggle to effectively deal with international drug trafficking if investigators focused mainly on political debate instead of tracing the people and systems that allowed the consignments to move.
