Ghana

The conman who duped thousands with a patently absurd story

In the early months of 1981, investors in a Swiss fund stuffed with cash, diamonds and gold began arriving at a five-star London hotel to await an audience with the fiscal wizard making them fabulously rich. Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah would turn up in his grey chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, clad in an immaculately tailored suit and clasping a big cigar in bejewelled hands. Then he would regale them with tales from his student days at the University of Pennsylvania, even singing the famous Penn fight song, and talk of developing Ghana using wealth plundered by his close friend Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first post-independence president. ‘No one could create such a

The scandal of rubbish disposal worldwide

Above a foul towering dump in Delhi a cloud of vultures and Siberian black kites fly in hope, ‘careening over the mountainside like some dreadful murmuration’. Here some of the world’s million waste pickers stash water bottles along their route, ‘like climbers making camp’. Oliver Franklin-Wallis concedes that his subject – the dirty truth of what happens to our rubbish – is not appealing. Much of the unusable, stained tat charity shops receive is sent abroad, whether it’s wanted or not But he does his best to make that untrue with arresting analogies and metaphors that shine like metal in trash in his account of his extensive travels through what

Boris Johnson fails to Ghana support

It’s not just MPs who are abandoning faith in Boris Johnson. The embattled PM appears to have alienated the entire state of Ghana in his latest efforts to save his faltering premiership. Last summer the Tory leader was all smiles with Ghanian President Nana Akufo-Addo, as the two joked around at the global education finance summit in London. But, in an attempt to throw some ‘red meat’ to restless Conservative backbenchers, Johnson has managed to damage relations with the influential West African nation. For today the Ghanian ministry of foreign affairs has issued a statement rebutting press reports suggesting that the country could process and resettle migrants which have arrived here illegally in