Media Must Stop Associating Drug Convicts With Politicians � NACOB Boss

Executive Secretary of the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB), Yaw Akrasi Sarpong, has cautioned the media to desist from trying to always link drug convicts with politics and politicians. According to him, the media always try to dig into the background of arrested drug dealers with the sole aim of finding out if they are related to any politician just to sell their newspapers. His comment is in relation to a newspaper report which sort to link an arrested drug dealer with a politician. The Herald newspaper on Monday published that its highly placed intelligence reveal that an official of the British Airways in Ghana and 7 others have been arrested over the narcotic drugs trafficking, as part of the government�s ant-narcotic war, in partnership with the British government and Drug Enforcement Administration of the USA. Eric Manu, is alleged to be a close relative of a powerful Minister who once served at the heart of the erstwhile Kufuor Administration. But speaking in an interview on OKAY FM�s �Ade3 Akye Abia� Morning Show, Mr. Akrasi Sarpong reiterated the need to de-politicize discussions on the operations of NACOB. He opined that since everybody has a family, it is not professional on the part of the media to dig into the background of someone�s family simply because of an arrest of a drug-trafficker. He questioned the rationale behind the media�s attempt to trace the family background of only one of the persons arrested and not all the eight involved in that illicit trade. �Whenever I speak, I emphasize that we do not want to politicize the NACOB governing board. Everybody belongs to a family so when we arrest someone and the media is informed, why don�t they publish the stories instead of digging into which family the person belongs to in order to find someone to link the person to or attach politics. We arrested a drug network made up of eight people who smuggle cocaine to London, so why did they decide to look for the family background of one and not the entire group? The most important thing is we have arrested them and they are helping in investigations,� he noted. Eric Manu and his partners are presently in specialized cells, assisting the Ghana law enforcement agencies and the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) in Britain in investigations.