Aaron Kanor is not the villain of Ghana’s baggage-exemption row. The law is exactly where he left it.
A traveller lands at Accra International Airport with three mobile phones in his hand luggage. Under Ghana’s customs regime, what happens next is not a mystery, a moral judgment, or an improvised shakedown. It is a procedure, set out in statute and regulation, that any passenger can read before he ever boards a plane. That a fortnight of public outrage has managed to obscure this simple fact says more about Ghana’s appetite for a villain than about the conduct of the Commissioner of Customs, Aaron Kanor.
Mr Kanor’s remarks at the airport on September 2nd sparked the row. Travellers, he said, should limit themselves to two phones; anything beyond that risked being treated as a commercial import. Critics pounced, accusing him of inventing an arbitrary cap out of thin air. He did no such thing. Section 17 of the Exemptions Act, 2022 (Act 1083) exempts a passenger’s baggage from customs duty, provided it is not goods for sale, barter, exchange or gift. It explicitly instructs the finance minister to set, by regulation, the permissible quantities to which that exemption applies. The minister did exactly that in November 2025, issuing the Exemptions Regulations (L.I. 2514), which hands the Commissioner-General of the Ghana Revenue Authority the job of determining how much baggage a passenger may bring in duty-free. Mr Kanor did not write himself a power. Parliament created it, the minister delegated it, and the Commissioner-General now administers it. Naming a number — two phones — is not overreach. It is the job description.
Much of the criticism conflates two separate questions. Whether the rule is wise, and whether Mr Kanor was entitled to state it. On the second question there should be no argument at all. A customs commissioner who declines to tell the public what the rules are is a worse public servant than one who states them plainly and takes the resulting heat. Ghanaians complaining that Mr Kanor “targeted” phone-carrying travellers have the causality backwards. He was explaining, unprompted, exactly what triggers scrutiny, so that people could avoid it. That is transparency, not persecution.
The GRA’s subsequent clarification that carrying more than two phones does not automatically attract duty, is routinely described as a climbdown. It is nothing of the sort. It is a description of the declaration procedure that is applied to every category of dutiable goods since the Exemptions Act came into force, and it is a system Mr Kanor’s original comments already anticipated. A traveller who declares extra devices proceeds through the correct channel, where an officer assesses whether the goods are commercial or personal. The officer weighs the quantity, checks the packaging, and whether the phones plainly belong to someone else. Pass that test, and the exemption applies in full. Nothing is owed. Fail it, and duty is due, precisely because the goods were never covered by Section 17(1) in the first place. The provision excludes goods meant for sale, barter or exchange from the exemption by its own terms. Therefore, the GRA’s later statement does not contradict Mr Kanor. It supplies the machinery that makes his warning meaningful. Declare, and the rule protects you, or conceal, and it does not. The two statements of the commissioner and the GRA press release were making the same argument in two registers — one blunt, one procedural.
The one genuine legal cloud over this affair has nothing to do with Mr Kanor’s judgment and everything to do with the architecture Parliament built. A lawyer, Jonathan Alua, has asked the Supreme Court to declare that Regulation 18(2)(b) of L.I. 2514 amounts to an unconstitutional variation of tax without parliamentary approval under Article 174(2). That is a serious question, and the courts should answer it. But it is a challenge to the regulation, not to the man executing it. Until a court says otherwise, L.I. 2514 remains valid law, and a commissioner who enforces valid law is doing precisely what his office requires. Holding Mr Kanor personally responsible for a constitutional question about delegated legislative power is like blaming a toll-booth operator for a dispute over the statute that set the toll.
Reasonable people can ask whether a Commissioner-General should have unreviewed discretion to set exemption quantities, or whether Parliament should fix the number itself and remove the ambiguity. That is a fair fight, and Mr Alua’s suit will settle at least part of it. But it is a fight about institutional design, not about a customs official who told the public, accurately and in advance, what the rules he administers actually say. If Ghanaians want a different rule, the remedy runs through Parliament and the courts, and not through blaming the man who read the regulation aloud.
Author: Mohammed Muntaka Abdul Rahman (The Kasoa Economist)
