Battling human trafficking, cybercrime and money laundering are all in a day’s work for Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, chief of Ghana’s Economic & Organised Crime Office.
Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, a UK-trained chartered forensic accountant, has more than three decades of experience as a police officer. She has spent half of it focusing on financial crime detection and investigation duties at the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service.
As a commissioner of police, Addo-Danquah, 54, is qualified to become the national police chief of the West African country before she attains the statutory mandatory retirement age of 60.
Since assuming office more than a year ago as the head of the anti-money laundering state agency, her office has retrieved more than $11m from proceeds of crime. The proceeds are from individuals and businesses who under-declared taxes and other wealth illegally acquired at the expense of state institutions.
Brand Focus Africa looks at seven things about the crime expert, who has been described as a woman of multiple firsts in the Ghana Police Service since its establishment in 1894.
1. Early life and education
Maame Tiwaa, as she is affectionately called, was born into a modest family to Kwame Adiya-Nimo and Nana Adwoa Agyekumwaa II (Queen mother of Banka) on 19 August 1969 at Konongo in the Ashanti Region. She is the second of six children.
Her educational journey commenced at the Roman Catholic Primary and Middle Schools and Bompata Secondary School. She furthered her education at Kumasi Polytechnic, where she obtained a Diploma in Business Studies Accounting. She also holds a Master of Business Administration (finance option) Degree from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana.
Maame Tiwaa took accounting courses with ACCA Global — Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) in the UK and chartered as an accountant after graduating.
2. Chasing her dream
COP Addo-Danquah’s childhood dream was to become a police officer. Her source of inspiration was a particular police woman she used to see on her way to school in her village in the 1970s. “She looked so beautiful in her uniform, and I wanted to be just like her,” she said in a TV interview.
What really reinforced that ambition was watching the aftermath of a murder in her village. She said the modus operandi of the detectives was top-notch.
“It appeared that they drank a lot and spent a lot of time sitting around and talking to people. We thought they were drunkards, but it turned out they were undercover police officers, and they learned who was behind the crime. I knew then what I wanted to do with my life,” she told the Africa edition of Accounting and Business magazine.
While waiting for her polytechnic results, she saw a police recruitment advert in a newspaper wrapped around a loaf of bread. She applied. She failed the height test three times but persisted and a police chief intervened on her behalf. She was allowed to write the entrance exams and she passed, starting as a recruit in 1990.
3. Woman of many firsts
Maame Tiwaa was the first commandant of the Ghana Police Command and Staff College, Winneba, the highest training institution of the Ghana Police Service. She was also the first woman administrator of the Ghana Police Hospital in the capital, Accra.
The first and only woman to be appointed director-general since the Criminal Investigation Department of the service was created in 1948, Addo-Danquah serves as the first female executive director of the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO).
She has also occupied other top positions in the police service, including director-general of the Police Intelligence and Professional Standards Bureau, head of finance at headquarters, and director-general of welfare. During the pandemic, she chaired the police service Covid-19 taskforce.
4. Controversy
In 2019, COP Maame Tiwaa came under a barrage of public backlash as the chief investigator of the Ghana police service. Three girls had been kidnapped in Ghana’s oil city of Takoradi, which dominated news headlines nationwide.
She held a press conference saying that the police knew where the kidnapped girls were, giving hope of rescuing them. It later turned out that the girls had been killed by the kidnappers. There was a general call on her to resign, but she stayed put.
“The good thing is that we learnt a lot from that incident. One of the key things was that we got our crime scene management wrong. After that we developed a training manual as to what to do when you get to a crime scene. It really affected me so much,” she recently said in an interview.
5. Side hustle
She is a guest resource person at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) Business School, E-Crime Academy, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ghana, Management Development and Productivity Institute (MDPI).
She also lectures at the University of Cape Coast, Department of Forensics and the president of the Ghana Police Ladies Association and immediate past president of the Association of Women Accountants, Ghana.
She is also a fellow of the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants (FCCA), an associate member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants (FCA), Ghana. Not one to rest on her laurels, she is currently studying taxation at the ASPIRE Executive Institute.
6. Awards
In her early days in the service, she was awarded the ‘Sword of Honour’ for being the Best Cadet Officer, Ghana Police College, and the best student in Humanities Award, Ghana Police College in 1999, making her the second female to receive that award at that time. She also received the International Association of Women Police (IAWP) Leadership Award in Indonesia in 2021.
