AS social partners in the effort to build and maintain a free, just and crime-free Ghana, the DAILY GRAPHIC and the Ghana Police Service have maintained a relationship of trust, probably until yesterday.
It is a relationship built and nurtured over many decades and whose pioneers apparently believed would outlast generations of leaders on either side in the interest of national security.
Indeed, such a bond of trust and mutual respect could only be the natural product of two institutions united by the forces of demand and supply of credible and reliable information needed to keep Ghana safe and secure.
In our time, we on the DAILY GRAPHIC side of the relationship have lived with the full knowledge that the chief nourisher of this bond is the lore that information so shared — some classified, some for public consumption — are sacred and that confidentiality ought to be treated as such.
We also believed that our partners on the other side were inspired by a similar ethic.
But, yesterday, the police, through the Director-General of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), attempted to re-define the relationship, in spite of his own claim that his gesture was not intended to put the Daily Graphic and the Police Administration “on a collision course”.
Ours is also not an attempt to join DCOP Yaw Adu-Poku on any collision course but to join him, in his own words, “to set the record straight” in the case of the arrest of some top executives of the pharmaceutical giant, Kinapharma, last Thursday.
And what are the facts of the case?
In the Thursday, December 11, 2009 issue of the DAILY GRAPHIC, we reported the arrest of “three top officials of the Kinapharma Pharmaceutical Company for possessing substances prohibited under Ghana’s Narcotic Control Law”, quoting sources within the CID.
Under a convention built on the trust alluded to earlier, there is nothing unusual about the police carrying out a legitimate duty and disclosing it to the media for publication to boost the morale of the security operatives, assure law-abiding citizens that their security is assured or serve as a deterrent to would-be offenders.
And the police had done so whether the event involved armed robbery or drugs, whether at the airport or at people’s homes.
Our CID source in the Kinapharma story provided all the elements of what had happened, why and where the arrests had been effected, how the operation had been carried out, who did it, when it took place, as well as the tests to be conducted.
The officer in charge of operations at the Accra office, Supt Sylvester Boyon, also went public the day after with some details on a radio station, with the following excerpts:
Supt Boyon: When we got there, there was a particular substance that NACOB people were not so sure of whether it contained some other substances or not. So we got instruction from CID Headquarters. We had sent those boxes there. They are now going to label them and send them for analysis. That is basically the case. ...It was ... false something like that ... cocaine. There is nobody in conclusive of anything. That is not my department. I cannot say much about that.
Question: So you are saying that the substance that you have found there you suspect is cocaine.
Supt Boyon: Basically that is curiosity, because they say it’s psychotropic drug ... material that they use for their thing. It is for curiosity purposes. I just wanted to have a test to know the actual substance. I just left there. NACOB members are still there. I do not think they have taken samples ...
The behaviour of the CID chief at the press conference yesterday appears to us to be the first attempt by a high-ranking police officer to call into question what had existed between two credible institutions bonded by mutual trust.
And he did it in a way that raises more interesting questions, to which we will return later.
In his press conference yesterday, DCOP Adu-Poku anchored his claim on the fact that the CID could not have been the source of the DAILY GRAPHIC story because, in his own words, the DAILY GRAPHIC publication of December 11, 2009 contained “factual errors which re-enforce the position that the information did not come from a credible source and for that matter from the CID Headquarters”.
And his reasons are that “only two officials from Kinapharma were arrested and not three, as contained in the publication. Besides, the Accra Regional Police Headquarters played a very important role in the whole operation that culminated in the arrest of the officials but they were conspicuously left out”.
Interestingly, DCOP Adu-Poku isolated the above statement from the real substance of the story as to whether the CID undertook the operation and how else DAILY GRAPHIC obtained the information.
Our simple question to the CID Chief is: Is this the reason we should not trust the police?
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