Ghana: nurse Salomay Awiti held incommunicado as a coup charge stalls in court
The case against Salomay Bafoh Awiti started with a late-night knock and has grown into one of the sharpest tests of Ghana’s rule-of-law credentials in years. The nurse, attached to the hospital at Abetifi in Techiman, was taken from her own home in an operation her counsel, Enoch Afoakwa, says breached several constitutional guarantees at once.
Ghana’s night raid: how the arrest unfolded
Shortly before 11 pm on Saturday, heavily armed security personnel turned up at Awiti’s residence. She was handcuffed in front of her family and driven away to a location that was never disclosed. The grounds given were opaque: suspected irregular Mobile Money transactions and the circulation of videos described as offensive.
Three minors left behind without care
The raid left a second, quieter emergency in its wake. Awiti’s three minor children, aged between 4 and 15, were abandoned at the house with no assistance and no arrangements for their welfare. For more than 48 hours — far beyond the constitutional limit on detention without charge — neither her relatives nor her legal team could obtain any confirmation of where she was being held.
Every door stayed shut. The Ghana Police Service, the National Security Secretariat and the Bureau of National Investigations each declined to confirm whether she was in their custody.
The hunt for a detainee and a wall of silence
Awiti’s lawyers eventually traced her to the Criminal Investigations Department in Accra, but only after a prolonged effort to establish her whereabouts. Afoakwa has since described interrogation methods he considers abusive, saying his client was pressed repeatedly to give statements without a lawyer at her side.
A coup allegation the prosecution could not file
The matter reached Circuit Court One, where it quickly took on a political colour. Prosecutors alleged a conspiracy to “overthrow the government” involving an online intermediary. The defence called the claim fanciful and noted that no charge sheet had been handed to the lawyers before the hearing. “We are back to the darkest hours of our history,” Afoakwa said, arguing that constitutional safeguards were being disregarded as a matter of routine.
Political fallout: parliament, doctors and civil society
The shock has reached the legislature. The governing New Patriotic Party and its legal figures — among them the MP and lawyer Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah — are under growing pressure from civil society and human rights organisations. While some MPs defend firmness on national security questions, the wider public is asking where the boundary now sits between fighting crime and bending the courts to intimidate political opponents.
As the medical profession and civil liberties groups intensified their protests, the court adjourned the session and ordered the prosecution to put its accusations in proper legal form.
Why the Awiti case matters beyond one nurse
The file is no longer about a single individual. It has become a measure of whether Ghanaian democracy can hold its ground against the temptation of arbitrary state power.
