The Ghana Police Service has requested to send their own team of investigators to Wau in South Sudan to find out the truth into allegations of sexual exploitation by some members of the Ghanaian Formed Police Unit (FPU).

On 8 February 2018, a complaint was received alleging that members of the Ghanaian FPU were engaging in sexual activity with women living at the UN Protection of Civilians site in Wau.

An investigation was immediately launched by the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), an independent office within the United Nations.

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General, David Shearer, and other Mission leaders, were briefed on the preliminary investigation on the morning of 22 February.

An immediate decision was made to remove the 46-member police unit from their duty stations inside the POC that afternoon. The unit was fully withdrawn from the Wau base to Juba over the next two days.

In its statement, the UN said information received indicates that some members of the FPU allegedly engaged in “transactional sex”. “This is a clear breach of the UN and UNMISS Code of Conduct which prohibits sexual relationships with vulnerable individuals, including all beneficiaries of assistance.

“UNMISS has informed UN headquarters in New York of the allegations, which in turn notified the Member State that the matter was being investigated by the United Nations. There is no indication that this behaviour is more widespread within the Mission”.

Reacting to this development, Director-General of Public Affairs of the Ghana Police Service, ACP David Eklu, said the Ghana Police Service has requested to send its own team of investigators to “get the full understanding of the incident that has happened.”

He told Moro Awudu on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class91.3FM on Monday, 26 February 2018, that: “We are not happy about this report because this is not what we expect especially when you take into account the track record of our various peace keeping missions, so, when we received the correspondent from the United Nations over the weekend, we quickly sent a response to the UN assuring them that we support all the systems and steps they have taken so far and we’ll support any investigations that will enable us to get to the bottom of this worrying development among our police officers who are on this peacekeeping mission.

“We also indicated that we’ll also want to send a team there if we are permitted to enter the mission area to also ascertain the fact for ourselves and get the full understanding of what has happened.”