If the Money Crossed Borders, Why Has the Investigation Stopped at the Border

Ghanafuor, when the state says that political speech was not merely spoken but financed, the investigation acquires a second duty. It must establish not only what was said, and by whom, but how the money moved, who sent it, who received it, and what those transfers were meant to accomplish. That is a more demanding task than holding a press conference. It is also the task that could restore public confidence in a case already clouded by questions of identity, method and proof.

On 18 September, the Director-General of the Criminal Investigation Department, Commissioner Lydia Yaako Donkor, told journalists that forensic examination of Salomey Awity Baffoe’s phone and mobile-money records had revealed financial links to the Ghana Jollof account. According to the police, influential people transferred significant sums to Baffoe, who then shared money with the account’s alleged operator, Barbara Asantewaa Kodua. Police also say Baffoe recruited people to redistribute the account’s videos. Baffoe has been charged with abetment of publication of false news and is due back in court on 30 September.

Those are serious allegations. They are not yet findings of a court. Graphic Online reported that the police said they intended to tender phone records, audio and other material in evidence. Until that material is tested in court, the public has heard the police’s account of the evidence, not the evidence itself.

That distinction is the whole point of due process. The state may investigate a suspected network. It may follow a financial trail. It may ask another country for help. But it must not ask the public to treat a press briefing as a verdict, or mistake an announced conclusion for a proved one.

And if the financial trail really does lead to the United Kingdom, then the border should be the beginning of the inquiry, not its convenient end. Ghana’s national security institutions could work through the proper channels with their UK counterparts to establish whether transfers took place, what they were for, and whether the evidence supports the police’s account of a coordinated operation. If the evidence points to an offence under UK law, the relevant British authorities can assess that question under their own law. If it points to an offence in Ghana, the Ghanaian authorities must prove that case in a Ghanaian court.

This is what thoughtful statecraft looks like: not a dramatic announcement, but the patient joining of records, testimony and lawful requests across jurisdictions. It is also what separates an investigation from a performance of investigation. A government that says it knows who financed a political account should be able to show, in court and through proper procedure, how it knows.

There may be a temptation to make the UK-based suspect’s immigration status, tax affairs or access to benefits part of the story. That temptation should be resisted unless evidence makes those matters directly relevant. HMRC is the UK’s tax authority, but a tax inquiry is not a shortcut to proving a political offence. Nor should speculation about benefits be used to stigmatise someone, pressure them into returning, or imply guilt by association. If a transfer was taxable or a declaration was legally required, the facts and the relevant law must establish that. They cannot be inferred from the fact that money crossed a border.

Otherwise, a case about alleged political financing slides into something much uglier: the suggestion that a person’s foreign residence makes them fair game for any suspicion the state wishes to attach. Ghanafuor, that is not cleverness. It is the old politics of finding a vulnerable handle on a person and pulling it, while calling the exercise national security.

The public deserves better than that, and the state deserves better too. A credible cross-border inquiry would have to answer basic questions. What are the dates and amounts of the alleged transfers? What records connect each transfer to the production or distribution of a particular video? Which part of the money is said to have funded political communication, and which part, if any, was simply a personal transaction? Who are the alleged recipients? What evidence distinguishes coordination from friendship, or ordinary financial support from a payment intended to influence public opinion?

These are not technical questions for lawyers to hide behind. They are the questions that determine whether the public is being shown a real funding network or invited to fill gaps in the evidence with political suspicion. If the case is strong, specific answers will strengthen it. If it is weak, no amount of theatrical language about “highly influential persons” can make it strong.

The same discipline must govern the speech at the centre of the investigation. A political social-media account may publish falsehoods, offensive insults or claims capable of causing real harm. That does not mean the state can skip the work of identifying the author, establishing the conduct alleged, proving the relevant connection and showing why the law applies. The more serious the accusation, the more exacting the proof must be. Otherwise, “national security” becomes a large Adinkra cloth thrown over a small table, hiding whatever the public has a right to see.

A democracy should be able to investigate the financing of political propaganda without turning every critic into an enemy of the state. It should be able to pursue a person believed to be abroad without treating immigration, tax or welfare questions as instruments of political convenience. It should be able to defend itself against deliberate falsehood while remembering that the first falsehood a government must guard against is the one it tells itself: that good intentions excuse shortcuts.

Ghanafuor, good intentions often pave the road to a metaphorical barren ancestral hellscape of pass-the-buck aampeh!

So let the authorities follow the money, if that is where the evidence leads. Let them seek lawful assistance from the United Kingdom, identify the transfers and disclose the relevant evidence in court. Let them establish whether any law was broken, rather than wave at a person’s residence or presumed financial status. And let the court decide what has been proved.

That is not softness. It is strength under discipline. A state that can make a case without bending the rules has nothing to fear from scrutiny. A state that cannot show its work should not ask the citizen to accept its conclusions on faith. That is unacceptable and intolerable, oooo, Ghanafuor.

Yooooooooooo.
Hmmm, Anansesemkrom Ghana paaa diy33. Tweaaaaaaaaa…