Ghana Is Becoming a Name in the Cocaine Trade; Is the pattern not troubling?
A container loaded at Tema is not the same as a coca field in the Andes but being fifth on anyone’s list and failing to explain how, is not nothing either.
There is a pattern deeply troubling about watching Ghana’s name turn up, time and again, in international cocaine seizure reports. Not because Ghana produces cocaine. It does not. The drug arrives from South America, thousands of kilometres away but increasingly, the containers carrying it are passing through Ghanaian ports, or leaving Ghana entirely, hidden inside legitimate Ghanaian exports used as cover.
That distinction matters and it is precisely why the polite version of this piece, “cocaine seized, Ghana not involved,” is the wrong one to settle for.
Belgian customs figures put Ghana as the fifth-largest country of origin for cocaine seized at the port of Antwerp in 2025, out of nearly 55 tonnes seized there that year, Ghana was the only African country on that list, alongside Ecuador, Costa Rica, Brazil and Colombia, names that have spent decades building, and fighting, reputations as transit points for South American cocaine. Ghana joined that company in one year.
“Country of origin,” in customs language, means only the country where a container was loaded and shipped, nothing more. So, the real question is not whether Ghana has become a cocaine-producing nation.
It is why do international trafficking networks keep finding Ghanaian ports and legitimate Ghanaian exports useful enough to move enormous quantities of narcotics across continents?
That is the question Ghana now has to answer. Not for Belgium’s benefit. For its own.
The pattern, in cargo terms
This is not a country that had one unlucky container. In late November 2025, Belgian authorities found 2,829 kilogrammes of cocaine hidden in cassava flour shipped from Tema. Weeks later, a further 1,158 kilogrammes turned up in another shipment from Ghana. Together, those two seizures account for roughly 7 percent of everything Antwerp confiscated that year, from a single country of loading.
Dutch customs had already seized 4.5 tonnes hidden in a timber shipment from Tema at Amsterdam in June 2025, the largest single seizure in that port’s history. And on September 10 this year, French customs at Dunkirk intercepted almost 3.9 tonnes of suspected cocaine hidden in a container of plastic waste from Ghana, worth an estimated €225 million.
These are not small packages hidden in someone’s suitcase. These are industrial quantities, moved through legitimate commercial channels, on three different European coastlines, within eighteen months. At that scale, this stops being a story about individual couriers and becomes a story about systems: how containers get selected for inspection, how reliable the scanners actually are, who reviews the images, and what is supposed to happen the moment one of those images looks wrong.
Where the story stops being foreign
The Dunkirk case answers that last question in the worst possible way. Six people have been denied bail by Ghana’s own Kwabenya Circuit Court in connection with the containers that left Tema Port. Among them are four officers of the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority, accused over the handling of the scanning process.
The prosecution’s allegation is specific that the scan images of those containers showed abnormalities serious enough to require further examination, and that the containers were cleared and allowed to leave anyway.
All six deny the charges and remain, as anyone must, presumed innocent until a court says otherwise. This editorial makes no claim about their guilt but the allegation itself, regardless of how the case concludes, describes precisely the kind of failure this piece is asking about.
It is not a cartel outwitting Ghana’s defences with extraordinary sophistication, but a scanner that reportedly flagged something wrong, and a system that let the container leave anyway.
Numbers on both sides of the ledger
It would be unfair to suggest Ghana is doing nothing. The Narcotics Control Commission reports 217 arrests and 165 prosecutions over its recent reporting period, alongside more than 8.5 tonnes of assorted narcotics and 45.4 million tramadol tablets intercepted, and has itself called for stronger international cooperation to trace trafficking networks and criminal proceeds.
President Mahama has convened security chiefs and directed an inter-agency task force to produce, within two weeks, a roadmap for strengthening detection at Ghana’s ports and borders.
Those numbers are real, and they matter but seizures and arrests, however numerous, answer only half the question the public actually needs answered not how much has been caught, but whether what is being caught reflects a system that is working, or a system that is merely lucky some of the time.
If a container carrying millions of dollars of cocaine can pass through a legitimate commercial chain, travel thousands of kilometres, and only be discovered by a foreign customs agency on the other end, Ghana has a problem that no amount of celebrating the eventual seizure will solve. The real victory was always going to be the container that never left Tema in the first place.
Follow the money, not just the courier
The Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference has pushed this exact point, calling for investigations that follow the money to the organisers and financiers behind these operations, not merely the people at the bottom of the chain. It is the right instinct. The person driving a truck, loading a container, or signing a shipping manifest may have no idea what he is actually part of, and even if he does, he is rarely the person who designed the operation. The courier is visible. The network is not.
A country that keeps arresting couriers while the financiers remain untouched has found a way to generate arrest statistics without touching the actual problem.
What this costs the innocent majority
Ghana has spent years building a reputation as a stable democracy and a commercial gateway to West Africa, open to legitimate international business. Ports are not merely conduits through which criminals can move drugs. They are infrastructure that thousands of honest businesses depend on every single day, and every additional inspection triggered by Ghana’s growing presence on seizure reports is time, and time is money, for exporters who had nothing to do with any of it.
The cocoa exporter is not a drug trafficker. The timber company is not a cartel. The plastics recycler is not a cocaine network. Yet all three now carry a reputational tax that criminals imposed on them by exploiting the same channels they use honestly.
There is a financial dimension too, one this piece would be incomplete without naming. Wherever cocaine moves through in tonnage quantities, its proceeds need somewhere to go, and “somewhere” tends to mean the same banks, property markets and legitimate-looking businesses Ghana has separately had to interrogate over unexplained wealth.
A country that is both a transshipment points for drugs and a soft target for laundering their proceeds is not two problems. It is one problem with two visible symptoms.
What being fifth should actually provoke
We should not panic nor accuse individuals without evidence. we should not turn every Ghanaian shipment into a suspect shipment, an overreaction that would punish the innocent majority for the sins of a criminal minority but neither should Ghana become comfortable with appearing, again and again, in the same sentence as “record seizure,” on the strength of a rotating cast of foreign customs agencies doing the discovering.
Nobody is suggesting Ghana has become Colombia. It has not, and treating a shipping-origin statistic as evidence of a domestic cocaine industry would be exactly the kind of lazy conflation this piece has tried to avoid throughout.
The honest question is no longer simply how much cocaine has been caught. It is how much has passed through Ghanaian ports without being caught and what the country is actually doing to make sure that number stops growing rather than merely gets discussed after the next headline.
Ghana needs answers, not headlines. Not another round of arrests followed by silence, but a clear account of how a scanner can flag a container, and a system can wave it through anyway. That is not a question for Belgium, France or the Netherlands to keep answering on Ghana’s behalf. It is a question Ghana owes itself.
By Hannah Agyemang
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