Government sets up special court for drug cases, Majority Leader Agalga announces

Pinned summary · as of 06:54

A new court devoted solely to narcotics offences has been set up by the government, Majority Leader James Agalga told journalists at Parliament House on Thursday, 24 September. Mr Agalga, who is also MP for Builsa North, said the court is aimed at working through a pile of drug cases that has built up over the years.

What we know

• James Agalga, the Majority Leader and MP for Builsa North, announced at Parliament House on Thursday, 24 September 2026 that the government has created a dedicated court to try narcotics offences.
• Mr Agalga said the court will push drug prosecutions along faster and help the system deal with a long-standing build-up of pending cases, while giving such trials consistency.
• Citing figures from NACOC, Mr Agalga put its 2025 record at 217 arrests spread over 165 cases, against 73 arrests nationwide in 2024.

What's disputed / unconfirmed

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  Mr Agalga described the 2025 arrest total as a 197 percent rise over 2024. This percentage was reported only by Rainbow Radio Online and comes from Mr Agalga himself.
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  According to Ghana MPs, Mr Agalga said 95 of the suspects have been sent to court and 120 remain under active investigation, and that six convictions came out of the 165 cases, a rate of 3.6 percent. No other report carries these numbers.
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  Ghana MPs reported that Mr Agalga said the court was set up under President John Dramani Mahama because drug cases had been scattered among the ordinary criminal list, and that this had left suspects waiting in the system and weakened the deterrent force of the narcotics law. He added that prosecutors and investigators were not being blamed; the scattering of cases was the cause. These are his own explanations and are not independently confirmed.
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  Mr Agalga said, as reported by Ghana MPs, that the court will gather drug cases in one forum, build specialist knowledge, narrow the gap between arrest and conviction and restore trust in the country's drug laws. Rainbow Radio Online separately quoted him saying the accumulated backlog can be systematically eradicated. These are expectations, not results.
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  Rainbow Radio Online reported Mr Agalga as saying that since March 2025 the administration has kept up a programme of investment, reform and expansion covering security agencies, staffing, training, equipment and forensic tools. Other reports do not carry this claim.
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  Ghana MPs said the Majority in Parliament asked NACOC, the police, the immigration service and the ports authority to keep cooperating, and urged citizens, journalists and fellow legislators to assess the government by the evidence and to hold it answerable for what remains to be done.

Why it matters for Ghana

Slow drug trials mean suspects can wait a long time for a verdict, and the figures Mr Agalga cited show few of the 165 cases reaching a conviction. If the new court works as described, cases involving trafficking would be heard in one place rather than competing with every other criminal matter. Whether that happens will depend on how the court operates in practice, which the reports do not yet describe.