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The arrest of Aisha Ibrahim at 6:30 pm last Thursday, following a collaboration between officers of the Bureau of National Investigation (BNI) and the Ghana Police Service.
The Upper East East Regional Minister, Tangoba Abayage, who confirmed this information on A1 radio in Bolgatanga, said the BNI officers had informed police on Thursday that a woman was doing to pbad fertilizers in Burkina Faso.
She said that when the police rushed to the scene, she saw two trucks, one with a Ghanaian registration number and the other with a serial number. Burkinabé registration.
Ms. Tangoba stated that the truck bearing the Ghanaian registration number was loaded with fertilizer bags with embossed PFJ stickers, while the Burkinabe truck was loaded with fertilizer without embossed stickers.
"Now, that's what they did. they removed the Planting for Food and Jobs stickers engraved on the fertilizer bags, tore them into pieces and, once removed and torn, they transferred them into the Burkina truck.
"These fertilizer bags were 50 kilogram bags. As at the time they [police] Arriving there, they transferred 350 bags from the Ghanaian truck, after removing the stickers on the Burkinabe truck, leaving 650 bags in the Ghanaian registered truck.
In all, the articulated truck had brought Navrongo a thousand 50 kilogram bags of fertilizer and transferred 350 to the Burkina truck. They were in the process when the police arrived on the scene, "said the regional minister.
The minister said the driver of the Burkinabé truck had fled before the police arrived at the scene and had not been found yet. However, the driver of the Ghanaian truck and Aisha Ibrahim, the main suspect, were arrested.
She explained that 50 kg bags of fertilizer are not allowed in the area, pointing out that "One thing you need to know is that the 50 kg bags are not even allowed in our region of the country. So every time you find a 50 kg fertilizer bag, this fertilizer is illegal. "
Ms. Tangoba commended the two security agencies – the BNI and the police – whose intelligence and efforts led to the interception of the fertilizer and the subsequent arrest of the main suspect.
She stated that after her arrest, the police went to the shops and that wherever she found 50 kg bags of PFJ fertilizer, they confiscated them and sent them to the police station. police.
The minister said: "I called the crop director of the Ministry of Agriculture because I did not understand why there should be stickers and not reliefs on the bag itself, and he explained that the fertilizers used last year, there remained more than.
"Last year, as you know, we had no embossing on the bags. That's one of the reasons we had a lot of smuggling across borders because you could not separate the work of Planting for Food and Jobs from being not intended to plant for food and employment and so we had leftovers.
"So this year, they made sure that if you left it in your warehouse, print stickers and put them on the bags to indicate that they are for Planting for Food and Jobs. So it is these types of fertilizer that they brought to Navrongo, which all wore stickers.
"But apart from the stickers, we also had labels. Each fertilizer for Planting Foods and Jobs has a special label that no other fertilizer bags have. So, even if you remove the sticker, these labels are there, they are sewn on the bags and each label has its own serial number. "So when we went there, even those who had removed the stickers, they had labels that were unique only to the Planting for Food and Jobs fertilizer bags.
As reported by the Minister, the roadmap indicated that fertilizer had been transported from Tema, in the Greater Accra region, to Navrongo. This is another reason that has made things worrying, she added, because anyone who brings fertilizer to the region knows the procedure to follow.
"When you bring fertilizer from outside the region, when you enter the region, the Regional Minister and the Regional Director of Agriculture should review your consignment note and then inspect the fertilizer to ensure that the contents from the the truck. We will make sure that everything goes well and then I should approve your waybill, as well as the regional director.
"When you arrive in the district where you are supposed to unload the fertilizer, the district director [of agriculture] and the district chief will do the same thing as us. In this case, we had no idea of how the fertilizer entered the area.
"But according to the documents they have, it comes from Tema. As I said, we are not allowed to bring 50 kg bags to this area. All 1000 bags weigh 50 kg.
This is the second time this year that the region has been recording a contraband of fertilizer for the PFJ program. Last month, two articulated trucks were seized with a total of 4,000 bags of fertilizer for the PFJ program.
Ms. Tangoba found that smuggling was becoming more of a cartel and had issued a harsh warning that security agencies were in a state of emergency to crack down on such unscrupulous people.
The main suspect in Thursday's smuggling attempt, Aisha Ibrahim, is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, July 29, 2019.
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