Ghana Needs a Citizens’ Army

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

On September 17, 2008, the Ghana News Agency (GNA) reported the immediate Government prohibition of several former senior members of the Ghana Armed Forces and the Police Service from either entering or venturing near any military and police installations and garrisons around the country. Among the affected officers were Lt.-Gen. Arnold Quainoo, former General Officer Commanding the Ghana Armed Forces; Admiral Owusu-Ansah, former Chief of Naval Staff; Brig.-Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, former Chief of Defense Staff; Brig.-Gen. Bruce Konuah, former Defense Adviser to Pakistan; Mr. C. K. Dewornu, former Inspector-General of Police; Mr. F. Y. Asare, former Greater-Accra Regional Police Commander; and Mr. W. K. Aboah, former Commissioner of Police and Director of Immigration Services.

According to the GNA, the order prohibiting the above-listed former military and police personnel from either entering or venturing near any sensitive national security installations was signed by Dr. Sam Amoo, Ghana’s National Security Coordinator. And as was to be expected in such circumstances, the Government did not give any further details or explanations for its action.

Naturally, this pro-forma – or routine – decision, on the part of the Government, which was not designed to provide a hyper-inquisitive Ghanaian public with details of the inner workings of the country’s security apparatus, has given rise to wild and humorous speculation among an apparently naive section of the mainstream Ghanaian media. In an article

captioned “Unintelligent Intelligence – You Are Banned!” (Ghanaweb.com 9/19/08), for example, one columnist-cum-radio personality predicated the Kufuor Administration’s evidently purely national security decision on an alleged rendezvous of the affected former military and police officers with career coup-plotter, assassin and former Ghanaian strongman Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings, during which alleged luncheon national security matters had been broached. Consequently the journalist, a Mr. Ato Kwamena Dadzie, ridiculed the Government on the rather gratuitous grounds that these supposedly “ageing” retired military officers are no prime candidates with whom a Rawlings dead-set on staging another coup would conspire.

Obviously, Mr. Dadzie misses two very significant points, namely, the fact that these officers still retain remarkable influences in national security circles; and secondly, the fact that planning a military putsch does not require younger military officers or recruits but mature and experienced strategists, which would readily appear to be the primary reason, or motive, why Mr. Rawlings would confer with the aforementioned senior army and police officers. For, needless to say, it is only at the execution stage of a coup plot that requires youthful muscles or brawns. And then also, one does not need even a high school diploma – or certificate – to fully appreciate the fundamental and indispensable necessity for expert planning beforehand. And here, it is also significant to recall the fact that the Rawlings-led activities that culminated in the overthrow of Dr. Hilla Limann and his People’s National Party (PNP) government on December 31, 1981, strikingly mirror what is currently being alleged in the mainstream national media, regarding the apparently sinister private dealings between Mr. Rawlings and his former minions.

Then also, not quite awhile ago, Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah took to both the air-waves as well as the Ghanaian print media attempting to lamely fault the Minister of Defense and the Kufuor government for the residential wastefulness and abject leadership irresponsibility and lack of professional competence on the part of the Ghana Armed Forces’ Chiefs of Defense Staff going back nearly twenty years. On this occasion, Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah issued a thinly-veiled threat about the readiness of the Ghana Armed Forces to seize power and “Rawlingsize” the country, should the voluntarily long-abandoned official residence of the Army’s Chief of Defense Staff be wisely put into productive use by being auctioned off to a private real estate developer. Couple the foregoing with Lt.-Gen. Arnold Quainoo’s Somanya Declaration last year that the National Democratic Congress is intent on forcing itself on Ghanaians, once more, irrespective of the outcome of Election 2008, and the credibility of Dr. Amoo, the National Security Coordinator, palpably verges on the outright incontrovertible. More so, when one also recalls the fact that Gen. Quainoo had issued his threat while raucously and sophomorically participating in the proscribed anniversary celebration of the June 4, 1979 Ghanaian Holocaust.

What is quite curiously interesting here, though, is the fact that Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah would blithely confer with the very personality whose National Security Adviser, according to reliable sources – and here the reference, of course, is to the expert and authoritative report of the Special Investigation Board (SIB) that probed the assassination of the Supreme Court judges on June 30, 1982 – masterminded the chilling abduction and brutal murder of the retired Major Sam Acquah, cousin to the former Army Chief of Defense Staff (CDS). Perhaps time has relegated the official murder of Major Sam Acquah into the deep recesses of irrelevance or an absolute non-issue in the imagination of Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah. Or, perhaps, the former CDS no longer believes that then-Chairman Jeremiah John Rawlings was fully complicit in the abduction and summary execution of Major Acquah?

Contrary to what some apparently naïve Ghanaian journalists and Rawlings sympathizers may want to believe, the Government’s prohibition of the retired senior military and police officers from sensitive national security installations, per se, is not the issue at stake here. Rather, the prohibition is primarily aimed at putting both the affected figures and the Ghanaian public, at large, on notice that the Government is fully aware of the seditious and clandestine activities of these reprobate coup-minded nation-wreckers and is fully prepared to deal with them, either jointly or severally, to the fullest extent permitted by the laws of the land, should such need arise.

Thus, it is rather laughable and unpardonably shameful for Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah to cavalierly presume, as the former CDS reportedly told an Accra radio station in the wake of the prohibition, that “I can sit in my house and still know whatever goes on at Burma Camp.” It simply means that the former Army CDS has yet to half-appreciate the political gravity of what he might have gotten himself into. Needless to say, his latter misguided pronouncement, as well as the pronouncements of his other affected former colleagues, in the wake of the prohibition, readily legitimizes any Government move, henceforth, to effectively guarantee – if it even means summarily liquidating these putative nation-wreckers – the political stability of the country.

One thing is also clear, and it is the fact that the Ghana Armed Forces and the Police Service, to-date, remain unsavory enclaves of neocolonialist thinking. A remarkable percentage of the membership of the Army appears to have convinced itself that it is, somehow, a discrete culture and law unto itself. This clinically morbid mindset needs to be promptly reversed; and the best way to do this is to convert the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) into a CITIZEN’S ARMY, the way it is done in the State of Israel, with every able-bodied Ghanaian citizen being required to serve in the military for a specified minimum number of years. Once this is done, Ghana would have achieved two significant things, namely, a stronger and civic-minded and thus politically more responsible and economically productive Army and, two, a politically and culturally unified nation-state in which there no longer exist two separate and mutually hostile communities consisting of a professionally armed, arrogant, reckless and dangerous public-supported occupying army, on the one hand, and an unarmed, vulnerable, docile and harried civilian population, as presently prevails.

In sum, to use Mr. Rawlings’ own pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric: “We need to democratize the guns.” Of course, such “democratization” of military firepower must be effected with the primary objective of both neutralizing potential nation-wreckers such as the prohibited former military personnel, as well as to significantly maximize the effectiveness of our national security apparatus.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 18 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005) and “Reena: Letters to an Indian-American Gal” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. #################################