Inside Ghana’s Awiti affair: what the secret detention of a nurse reveals about security agencies and the courts
The abrupt arrest and secret detention of nurse Salomay Bafoh Awiti has triggered a political and legal storm in Ghana. For years the country has taken pride in its democratic traditions and respect for the rule of law, but the facts uncovered by her lawyer, Enoch Afoakwa, sharply call into question the conduct of national security agencies and the disproportionate use of public force against citizens.
The night everything shifted: a pre-dawn raid and children left behind
The events date back to last Saturday around 11 p.m., when heavily armed security agents stormed the home of Salomay Bafoh Awiti, a graduate nurse on duty at Abetifi Hospital in Techiman. Handcuffed in front of her relatives under the opaque pretext of suspicious financial transactions via Mobile Money and the circulation of videos deemed “offensive”, the nurse was taken to an unknown destination.
The human tragedy was compounded by a blatant violation of social protection protocols: the agents took the mother away, leaving behind her three minor children, aged 4 and 15, without any assistance or care. For more than 48 hours — beyond the constitutional limit for police custody — her family and legal team faced a wall of silence. From the Ghana Police Service to the National Security Secretariat and the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), no institution would confirm where the accused was being held.
State security charges and trampled rights
Only after an arduous search did Enoch Afoakwa finally locate his client, transferred to the premises of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) in Accra. The lawyer denounced abusive interrogation methods, saying the nurse had been subjected to repeated pressure to testify without her legal counsel present.
When she was brought before Circuit Court One, the case took a sharply political turn as prosecutors invoked an alleged conspiracy to “overthrow the government” in complicity with a virtual intermediary. The defense dismissed the charge as outlandish, pointing out that prosecutors failed to provide any charge sheet to the lawyers before the hearing. “We are back to the darkest hours of our history,” Afoakwa fumed, pointing to a systematic violation of constitutional guarantees.
The majority’s awkward silence and the institutional stakes
The shockwave from this case is reverberating all the way to Parliament, where the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) majority and its legal figures — such as MP and lawyer Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah — are coming under pressure from civil society and human rights organizations. While some lawmakers work to defend institutional firmness on national security matters, public opinion is questioning the increasingly porous line between fighting crime and instrumentalizing the judicial system for political intimidation.
Faced with growing protests from the medical profession and civil liberties groups, the court adjourned the session to force the prosecution to formalize its charges. The case has now moved beyond the individual fate of Miss Awiti to become the ultimate test of Ghanaian democracy’s resilience in the face of arbitrary state power.
