'Give more support to NACOB'

Page 14: Daily Graphic, March 10, 2010.
Story: Albert K. Salia
THE United States government has stressed the need for increased funding and logistical support for the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB) so as to sustain the fight against drug trafficking.
While acknowledging successes in President J. E. Mills’s first year in office in the fight against drug trafficking, the US government expressed regret that Ghana’s own funding for NACOB and law enforcement agencies remained insufficient and warned that “unless the government remedies this situation and provides adequate resources to combat narcotics trafficking, little progress will be made quickly, and none sustained over the long term”.
These were contained in the 2010 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), a report by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the US State Department issued to the US Congress on March 1, 2010.
It made it clear that progress required strong and sustained political will and continued international assistance for Ghana to confront those difficult issues, giving an assurance that “the U.S. government will press Ghana to increase the resources and capabilities of those fighting illegal narcotics, money laundering and other international crimes”.
The report said the US government’s counter-narcotic and anti-crime goals in Ghana were to strengthen Ghanaian law enforcement capacity generally, to improve interdiction capacities, to enhance NACOB’s capacity, and to reduce Ghana’s role as a transit point for narcotics.
In line with those objectives, it said, in 2009 the U.S. supported Ghana’s counter-narcotic efforts and made plans for additional support in future years, adding that AFRICOM had provided approximately $500,000 toward the construction of an evidence storage and training facility at the CID headquarters in Accra.
When completed, the facility would store drugs collected as evidence in pending court cases.
Additionally, it said, AFRICOM had contracted to construct a security room at the airport to house a State Department-funded body scanner to detect drugs ingested by passengers and other contrabands concealed on or in a person’s body.
It said the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) had also provided more than $333,000 to fund a special prosecutor in the Ghanaian Ministry of Justice, stressing that the prosecutor would work with local prosecutors to improve Ghana’s capacity to investigate and prosecute organised criminal activity and to enforce its laws against narcotics trafficking.