Political Scientist, Dr. John Osae-Kwapong, has observed that there is a general decline in the level of trust in state institutions.
He explained that the failure of government officials to provide information to the public and to do so timeously had largely contributed to the high levels of mistrust.
“Recent calls for a probe into the supposed deportation of Chinese national and galamsey kingpin, En Huang popularly known as Aisha Huang is a manifestation of the said mistrust in state institutions.
“One of the issues you’d find is that there is also a trust issue when it comes to our governance institutions, so over time if you look at the percentage of Ghanaians who say they trust institutions, whether it is the court, whether it is Parliament, whether it is the police, whether it is the Presidency, you see low levels of trust and then also declining levels of trust.
“So in such an environment, if information is not provided and provided rapidly, such narratives tend to grow and perpetuate and persist,” Dr Osae-Kwapong noted.
He indicated that in the case of Aisha Huang what was even fuelling the mistrust was the fact that she was able to return into the country undetected and engaged in the same illegal activity that had gotten her deported in the first place.
“I think all of those issues deepens that suspicion and deepens that mistrust of the state institutions that are supposed to enforce the law around whether it is illegal mining, whether it is immigration issues, and all of that, mistrust, knowing that someone deemed to have broken the laws of Ghana is able to come back is what is actually fueling this narrative that probably she did not even leave,” Dr Osae-Kwapong pointed out.
He contended that as shown there are records of the deportation order, there was evidence she boarded an Ethiopian Airlines flight but in an environment of mistrust it was difficult for state institutions to get citizens to believe them even when they were telling them the truth.
