Ghana to UK: the new trail of misery

With the trial of two British girls accused of smuggling drugs set to resume this week, Dan McDougall in Prampram reveals how cartels move their cocaine to Europe by exploiting the vulnerable and the poor
Sunday November 11, 2007
The Observer

THE condoms are smeared in margarine or local vegetable oil, 'to help them slip down', says Kawko, holding out the white grains of pure cocaine in his scarred palm. Behind him, on the palm-tree fringed beach of Prampram village, dozens of colourfully painted longboats make land; the bulky wooden vessels heaved and roped out of the roaring West Atlantic by slender teenage boys.

'There are many other couriers here in Ghana; some have made a dozen journeys to London and Amsterdam. You can see the benefit it has brought to their families, even here in our village. Their mothers have stopped working; some have motorbikes and have bought fishing boats. Some have also died. A schoolfriend of mine swallowed over 50 condoms and died within an hour. He dipped the condoms in honey and they ruptured. He was foolish; the condoms were local, not imported.' Kawko gestures to where his youngest son is playing in the sea with a yellow plastic oil drum. 'I wouldn't want this life for him.'

Over the past few years a concerted shift in trafficking routes has transformed West African countries like Ghana, Senegal and Guinea Bissau into volatile hubs for cocaine smuggled from South America to a booming European market. Using sophisticated transportation networks and the latest communication technology to elude woefully inept coastguards, Colombian traffickers are establishing transit areas along the Gulf of Guinea that can only worsen lawlessness in countries already overwhelmed by crime, poverty and instability.

For locals the route opens up a risky but tempting way out of poverty. A single flight to Amsterdam from Ghana, via Morocco, earlier this year carried 32 West Africans, all of whom had swallowed cocaine packets or concealed them in their luggage. Impatient with the increasing arrest rates of mules, the South American cartels have recruited London-based Nigerians and Ghanaians to scour Britain's capital for gullible teenage drug couriers.

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