Why Does the Ghana Police Always Turn a Criminal Suspect into a Nigerian Problem?

There is something profoundly disturbing about the manner in which the Ghana Police Service sometimes presents Nigerians to the Ghanaian public whenever crime is involved.

All over the world, it is not the police’s responsibility to manufacture criminals. It is their responsibility to investigate crimes, arrest suspects, gather evidence, and present the facts to the courts.

Anything beyond that risks turning policing into public relations theatre, and, worse, feeding an ugly stereotype against an entire nationality.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what the Ghana Police Service is doing whenever the case concerns a Nigerian national.

The latest example is the sensational treatment of the alleged armed-robbery incident at Labone, Accra, in which two suspected robbers were reportedly killed in a shootout with the police and another suspect, said to be Nigerian, was arrested.

Accounts circulating about the incident say the suspects had been monitoring customers around a bank before the confrontation.

The bank released a statement denying the police allegations.

Nobody should defend armed robbery. If these men committed the crimes alleged against them, they should face the full consequences of Ghanaian law.

But that is precisely the point: alleged.
The police must establish guilt through evidence, not through the camera and sensational half-baked press releases.

Why was the nationality of the surviving suspect so prominently advertised? Why does the nationality of a suspect become part of the headline when the nationality of the dead suspects appears less important?

Why have the identities of the two deceased men reportedly not been made public? And why are questions being raised about whether the vehicle paraded in connection with the operation had appeared in previous police releases?

These are not accusations of police misconduct. They are legitimate questions which a professional police institution should welcome rather than dismiss.

There is another revealing absurdity. The man has reportedly been identified as “Maazi.” Yet Maàzị/Mazi is not, in itself, a family surname. In Igbo, it is a form of address corresponding roughly to “Mr.” or “Mister.”

An Igbo linguist, Nkowa Okwu, defines maàzị precisely as a formal way of addressing a mature male.

Imagine a police report identifying an English-speaking suspect as “Mr.” and presenting “Mr.” as though it were his surname.

The error may appear amusing, but it becomes serious when an institution possessing the enormous authority of the state uses imprecise identification in a sensational criminal narrative.

And this is not an isolated concern.
In 2013, the Accra Regional Police Command publicly discussed the involvement of Nigerians in violent crime.

The then Accra Regional Police PRO, DSP Freeman Tetteh, reportedly acknowledged the damaging consequences of such narratives, saying that the impression had developed that “every Nigerian is a criminal,” while explicitly stating that Nigerians were not all criminals. He also acknowledged that Ghanaian accomplices were involved in such crimes.

That admission should have settled the matter permanently: criminality has no nationality.

Yet the problem persists. In 2025, anti-Nigerian protests in Ghana openly linked Nigerians collectively with armed robbery, kidnapping and other crimes. Many of the placards reportedly demanded that Nigerians leave Ghana.

In such an atmosphere, every unnecessary emphasis on an accused person's nationality has consequences far beyond the individual case.

The Ghana Police Service has extensive machinery for professional investigation. Its Criminal Investigation Department includes specialized units for anti-armed robbery, cybercrime, intelligence gathering, crime-scene management and legal prosecution.

That is what the Ghanaian public needs: investigation, evidence, and prosecution, not some Rambo theatrical displays designed to make the police look heroic on camera.

The Ghana Police Service’s 2017 annual report recorded 1,772 robbery cases and noted that six people died after engaging police in shootouts. The report recorded Ghanaian police officers among those arrested for robbery.

There is a dangerous temptation in modern policing to confuse successful investigation with successful publicity. The former requires painstaking evidence; the latter requires cameras, dramatic language and a convenient villain.

The Ghana Police Service must resist that temptation.

We urge the police authorities to be professional, restrained and scrupulously impartial in their treatment of everybody residing within the Republic of Ghana.

We do not condone criminality, whether committed by Ghanaians, Nigerians, Chinese, Europeans or anybody else.

But the law is very clear in principle: an accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. That principle does not become optional because television cameras are rolling.

Ghana and Nigeria are not merely neighboring countries. The two countries are the historic pillars of West Africa, bound by geography, commerce, culture, migration, intermarriage and generations of human interaction.

Whatever criminal elements may exist among Nigerians in Ghana, no one denies that there are criminals among Nigerians, as there are among Ghanaians; those individuals must never be used as an excuse to tar millions of law-abiding Nigerians with the same brush.

No one disputes that the Ghana Police Service has a duty to protect Ghana, but the Service also has a duty not to manufacture enemies of Ghana from innocent people.

Professional policing should pursue criminals, not nationalities.

©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com