1. Yesterday, Australia’s border police reported that a consignment of charcoal from Ghana shipped to Port Botany in two containers contained methamphetamines worth ~$210 million in street value.
2. That’s like a lot of meth, man.
3. On the Aussie side, a British actress and an Adelaide couple have been taken into custody.
4. We are not getting any serious filla from Ghanaian security agencies. In the last two years, we have seen several of such strange criminal consignments popped up with zero updates from the security services.
5. Remember the Sapeiman bust? The one where kilos of gold and cash were found in mysterious boxes? No serious update till now.
6. The Australian meth bust actually happened in April 2026. Ghanaian law enforcement have known since then. Not one word.
7. This bust involving charcoal however opens up an interesting new angle outside the Ghanaian security services.
8. No one can ship or tranship charcoal out of Ghana without a Charcoal Export Permit from the ENERGY COMMISSION. And if the charcoal originates in Ghana, one needs a Charcoal Production License. 9. I once investigated a situation where Ghanaian charcoal producers were blaming Energy Commission for delays in securing permits for export, leading to a collapse in overseas sales.
10. What’s more, the permit process includes the intended shipping line’s details, approved export quantity, and authorised destination.
11. The permit bears the name of the licensee, permit validity period, and the destination. Since quotas are strictly enforced, circumvention is literally criminal.
12. Energy Commission, where is the data?
3. By convention, these details are even supposed to be in the publicly inspectable register.
14. So far, the only data on charcoal exports from the Energy Commission do not include Australia as an end-destination for the 13 primary exporters. Asia tops and then Europe.
15. Commercial databases only shows only $124k in wood exports (of which charcoal is likely a small subset) to Australia.
16. Regarding meth itself, Ghana is a growing node in the production of “precursors,” i.e. raw chemicals that can be turned into meth with ease (with imports supposedly regulated by NACOC), according to GI-TOC, UNODC, and other global intel services. But documented raids in Africa on actual meth factories have mostly been in South Africa and Nigeria.
17. In fact, the June 2022 Daniel Ameko/Ibrahim Fosu case was a Ghana-to-Australia meth bust using Aramex as courier.
18. Then there was a 2025 transhipment case involving Rwandan and Nigerian nodes with Ghana as transit hub.
19. Very little info has been published by the security services about all these episodes. Meanwhile, such developments raise Ghana’s risk profile for all Ghanaian travellers and businesses dealing with overseas parties.
20. Will the Energy Commission do better on this one? Will they? We want the data.
