The coconuts were genuine. What lay beneath them was anything but.
Spanish customs officers found that out at the port of Valencia, where two containers from Ghana were carrying 2,600 kilos of cocaine beneath false floors. The Tema Port cocaine seizure is the latest shipment linked to Ghana to surface in Europe. Spain’s Tax Agency and the Civil Guard announced the seizure on 11 November.
The containers were loaded at Tema on 2 August and reached Valencia on 22 August, according to the joint statement. A customs unit picked them out because they presented a “high risk profile”. Inside, every wooden box held a full layer of packages beneath the declared coconuts. A field test confirmed the powder was cocaine.
Then came the part that made the Spanish operation more than a routine seizure. Nobody was arrested at the dock.
Investigators took out the drugs, finished the customs formalities and let the goods move on under watch. Two refrigerated lorries carried them to a warehouse on the La Juaida industrial estate near Almería. Officers watched the unloading and arrested two men in Viator, the suspected importer and the person in charge of unloading. Spain has not released their names or nationalities.
But the Valencia shipment was not the only cocaine consignment intercepted around Tema that month.
Three days after the coconut containers were loaded, police moved in at the Tema Harbour enclave, intercepting 866 parcels of suspected cocaine packed in gari sacks as another consignment was being prepared for export. The estimated street value was $6.9 million.
JoyNews Research recorded NACOC’s director-general, Brigadier General Maxwell Obuba Mantey, telling traffickers in June: “We are coming for you.”
In September, French customs found nearly 3.9 tonnes of cocaine in a container of plastic waste from Ghana at Dunkirk. President John Mahama then summoned security chiefs to Jubilee House on 17 September. JoyNews Research reported that he put NACOC back into joint container inspections, which a 2018 Cabinet decision had taken it out of.
The coconut containers had reached Valencia almost four weeks before that meeting. Nothing in the Spanish statement says whether the new arrangements would have caught the Tema Port cocaine. They did not exist when the crates were loaded.
Gari sacks. Plastic waste. Now coconut crates. The disguise keeps changing, yet each time it is an ordinary export.
The numbers show where the catching happens. By 22 September, JoyNews Research had tallied about 12.4 tonnes of Ghana-linked cocaine stopped in Europe. On Ghanaian soil, seizures with published weights came to about 3.6 tonnes. Put another way, more than three kilos of Ghana-linked cocaine were intercepted abroad for every kilo seized on Ghanaian soil. The Tema Port cocaine haul in Valencia was announced after that tally closed.
One caution is fair. Being the port of departure does not make Ghana the source. JoyNews notes that Belgium’s Federal Finance Department ranked Ghana fifth among the countries from which cocaine seized at Antwerp in 2025 was shipped. The drugs are believed to start in South America, hidden inside legitimate exports.
The Spanish statement leaves the biggest questions about the Tema Port cocaine unanswered. It does not say whether the drugs went in before the containers left Ghana or were added somewhere along the route. It does not mention any Ghanaian agency helping the investigation. And the only arrests confirmed so far are the two in Almería.
Until those answers come, the Tema Port cocaine shipment is a case with a known arrival point and no named sender.
Spain has found this false floor. The harder question for Tema is who finds the next one first.
