Assignment: Ghana militants in the Sahel

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For years now, an Islamist insurgency in the Sahel region has been claiming thousands of lives and displacing millions of people. There are fears that it is spreading to one of West Africa’s most stable countries. Ed Butler investigates some new and disturbing indications that fighting on Ghana’s northern border with Burkina Faso has the potential to spread south as well. It is not just the Islamist insurgency, but homegrown conflicts inside Ghana that have the potential to spread. And we hear accounts of smuggled livestock, fuel and weapons, as well as stories of Ghanaian fighters joining the Islamist uprising in the north.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:06.2	My name's Ed Butler and this week I'm on assignment in Ghana, where our story begins with a bit of a curiosity involving fuel.
0:16.2	So we're driving north right up to the border between Ghana and Burkina Faso.
0:23.3	It's a town called Paga in the north of Ghana.
0:25.8	And it is remarkable just how many filling stations there are along the way.
0:34.7	In the car with me is a local journalist, Edward Adetti.
0:38.3	It may pass as one of the wonders of the world. A very short stretch. I think it's about 11
0:43.5	kilometres from Navrongo to where we are, Parga. Yet you have so many filling stations. Some
0:48.8	are so close to one another, so close, just sharing the wall. 14, 15.
0:56.1	It's every 100 meters.
0:57.8	There's another petrol station here.
1:02.4	24 now.
1:04.1	The 24th.
1:06.1	Seems to be the one that the lorry drivers are stocking up their tanks with.
1:12.4	And here, up ahead, is the actual frontier.
1:18.3	Wow, that is extraordinary.
1:21.0	And it's not a very well-kept secret, Edward says.
1:24.3	Garner's fuel stations are feeding Bikina Faso's hunger for cheap fuel. So we've counted 24
1:31.1	and probably more as even on their way being built, it only tells that smuggling is going on.
1:40.4	How does it work then? What do they do? Mostly they take this fuel through unapproved routes.
1:46.1	There are so many.
1:47.1	They even load from filling citizens direct in Jerikans
	...

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