It was “amateurish” and “made no sense” for the government of President John Mahama to have dissolved the board of the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB) in November 2014 following the arrest of Ghanaian/Austrian Nayele Ametefe with 12.5kg of cocaine which she smuggled from Accra to the UK, Ghana’s former Executive Secretary of the anti-drug enforcement body, Mr Akrasi Sarpong, has said.
No official reason was given by President Mahama or his government at the time for the dissolution of the governing board of NACOB following Nayele’s arrest with the consignment of cocaine which had an estimated street value of 1.9 million Pounds. Ms Ametefe was reported to have had on her $23,000 and 6000 Pounds at the time of her arrest.
Nayele, who later said she renounced her Ghanaian citizenship to become an Austrian citizen, was arrested by port security at Heathrow on November 10 with the cocaine consignment in her hand luggage.
After her arrest, Deputy Executive Secretary of NACOB at the time, Mr Richard Nii Lante Blankson, issued a statement saying, “It is worthy to note that Ms Nayele Ametefe travelled on an Austrian passport number P4187659 and not on Ghanaian Diplomatic passport as being speculated. She also had in her possession an ordinary Ghanaian passport number G0364497 issued on 3rd August, 2012.”
The statement said Nayele was arrested “through the collaborative effort of the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB) and its British partners”. This particular claim by NACOB was doubted by Communications Minister at the time Dr Edward Omane Boamah, who challenged the anti-drug enforcement body to provide proof of its alleged collaboration in the arrest of the suspect.
According to Mr Akrasi Sarpong, the board chair of NACOB at the time was a member of the body that was put together to investigate Nayele, thus, the dissolution of the board thwarted the investigations.
Advocating that the truncated investigations into the case be continued by the new Akufo-Addo government, Mr Akrasi Sarpong told UTV’s morning show Adekye Nsroma in an interview on Friday, 16 June that it was important to get to the bottom of how Nayele gained access to the VVIP lounge of the Kotaka International Airport to ferry the drug. “Let us investigate the way and manner she went about using the VVIP lounge,” he said, adding: “There was an investigation going on, it had been set up, my board chair was a member, then all of a sudden the board was dissolved.”
Asked by host Nana Yaa Konama Asare if he knew why the president dissolved the board, Mr Sarpong retorted: “Do I know? Nobody gave me any reason and that was one of the greatest mistakes ever made by any government.
“Why would you dissolve a NACOB board and not bring it back? That was one of the greatest mistakes, and, so, I was really sad. I just thought that it was amateurish of any government to do that type of thing, very, very amateurish. I mean, it is so amateurish it doesn’t make sense anywhere. Well maybe [it was because of] the name that has come, but if you were going to dissolve it, two things: after dissolving it, you put [a new one] in place immediately, particularly when the board chairman issued a statement which was on social media because none of the board members made any mistake. No board member made a mistake, so after dissolving the board you had to make sure that at least the investigations continued so that we would all know what really mattered.
“That is why I’m saying that the [investigation] is still hanging and for it to continue hanging will be a disgrace to government, not NPP; it’s a disgrace to the state.”
Source:Ghana/AccraFM.com
