CitiFM could have done better with this story

The removal of Mr. Peter Nsiah, Police Commander of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology Police Post, in the Asante regional capital of Kumasi, was not properly explained by the Citifmonline.com reporter who reported the same. In the end, the story left the critically thinking reader wondering about the point of it all.

In the main, Mr. Nsiah, an Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), was reported to have mishandled a typical case of fraud, in which a woman was allegedly cheated out of some unspecified amount of money which she had forked up to some unidentified swindlers who had promised to deliver an automobile to her. The undescribed automobile, readers are told, was never delivered.

ASP Nsiah appears to have thwarted the efforts of the crime officer or detective on staff at the KNUST police station who has now been asked by the regional command office to take charge of his suburban police post, while Mr. Nsiah gets to head the regional Department of Community Policing of the Ghana Police Service.

What is troubling here is that readers are not given details about precisely how Mr. Nsiah botched the case as a result of which he is being transferred to the Asante Regional Police Headquarters. What is more, the allegedly professionally incompetent ASP Nsiah actually appears to have been promoted for grossly misconducting himself, which makes the report all the more bizarre, if also because it clearly undermines the already badly dented reputation of the personnel of the Ghana Police Service.

It is for this reason why one wishes that the Citifmonline.com reporter who covered the event could revisit the same and this time provide the reading public with more significant details, so as to put matters to rest and focus on other more pressing issues of social concern and relevance.

What most concerns this writer, though, is the fact that a man who has been publicly alleged to have grossly bungled a patent open-and-shut case of fraud, would be envisaged by the top police brass at the Asante Regional Police Headquarters to be competent enough to captain the Community Policing Unit of the Service, knowing fully well that community policing also entails the handling of cases of theft and fraud of the nature that Mr. Nsiah has been accused of grossly mishandling as Station Chief of the KNUST police post.

Needless to say, there appears to be something serious and significant here that some senior staff members of the Asante Regional Police Command are not telling the Ghanaian taxpayer who pays their salaries and perks. And this clearly appears to be why there is an imperative need for Parliament to pass the Right to Information (RTI) Bill, currently being hotly debated on the floor of the august House.