Say no to coup

Once again, March 6, the day Ghana became a sovereign state, has come and gone.

Interestingly enough, the man who led the country to achieve independence was ousted from power on February 24, 1966. Consequently, every year, the day President Nkrumah was overthrown is remembered, whether formally or informally, ahead of the day he led the country to political

Read full articleindependence. How ironic!

This year, February 24, would have passed me by, if not for an announcement by a group known as the Socialist Forum, inviting all socialists and revolutionaries to an event to commemorate what it termed “Ghana’s Day of Shame”.

In my travels, the name Kwame Nkrumah has become synonymous with our country, Ghana. In fact, in many places, the only way to distinguish Ghana from Guyana is to refer to Kwame Nkrumah’s country.

Faraway in Zanzibar in 2003, a colleague and I lost our way and found ourselves on Kwame Nkrumah Avenue. When we identified ourselves as Ghanaians, we were taken to a posh restaurant, offered free drinks, and chauffeur-driven to our hotel. That was how the name of Kwame Nkrumah opened doors for us.

I am therefore proud, as a Ghanaian, of the Nkrumah brand. However, I will be the first to admit that Nkrumah was no saint. He had his flaws. Perhaps Professor Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan-born American academic, summed this up beautifully, when, in comparing Nkrumah to Rawlings, he noted that Kwame Nkrumah started as a democrat and ended as a dictator while JJ Rawlings started as a dictator and ended as a democrat.

How apt!

On December 31, 1981, Ghanaians heard the familiar voice of Flt Lt JJ Rawlings from the studios of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), announcing yet another coup, having handed over power to Dr. Hilla Limann's administration barely two years earlier.

In that broadcast, Rawlings said that the December 31 coup, which he described as a revolution, was the coup to end all coups in Ghana. Thus far, his wish or prophecy has come true. From that moment, having remained under military rule for eleven long years, Ghana was ushered into the 4th Republic on 7th January 1993 and has enjoyed relative political stability ever since. How long we shall continue to enjoy that peace, however, is anybody’s guess, given current events.

I admire the yearly ritual by the Socialist Forum and like-minded groups to condemn the coup of February 24, 1966, which effectively opened the floodgates, in subsequent years, for similar interruptions in Ghana and elsewhere on the African continent. However, it does not appear as if such groups are averse to military interventions as a principle. For instance, their utterances, following the military takeovers in Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, do not portray people who dislike coups, which, in my view, smacks of hypocrisy.

On a television programme, I had the distinct impression that one of the stalwarts of the Socialist Forum, Comrade Kwasi Pratt, who is a vociferous commentator on national and international affairs, supported the coups in those countries. He tried to justify them. Describing the coup in Guinea as bloodless, which was untrue anyway, he said the masses came out to support it, so it was justified. What he did not acknowledge was the fact that every coup is always supported by the so-called masses. Indeed, the coup which overthrew our first president was massively celebrated, but that did not make it right.

The seeming implication of his claim that the conditions in Ghana were not dissimilar to what provoked the crisis in Guinea was a veiled threat on our democratic dispensation, if I may say so.

On the situation in Burkina Faso, he asserted that Islamic Jihadists were in control of 70% of that country. That cannot be true. Perhaps his understanding of a country being controlled by rebel forces is different from mine.

In my opinion, in military terms, controlling 70% of Burkina Faso means that the Jihadists were holding the ground with their forces and had appointed their own administrators to run the territory. In Liberia, we saw what it meant to control territory when Charles Taylor struck from Nimba County and effectively divided the country. However, that is not the case in Burkina Faso.

It was actually the northern part of Mali that was briefly occupied by the Jihadists before they were expelled by the Malian forces with the help of French troops. In Burkina Faso, the Islamist forces conduct ambushes, hit and run tactics, and other terrorist activities from their hideouts, mostly targeted at civilians, and return to those hideouts after their operations. They do not engage the government forces in direct combat.

The same thing is happening in some parts of Nigeria, but that cannot be construed as controlling that part of the country.

In the history of the 4th Republic, the word “coup” has never been as popular in our Ghanaian lexicon as it is today. Hardly do you tune into a radio or television station without hearing of the possibility of a coup. That has opened the floodgates for all sorts of jokes, speculations, declarations, and threats against those currently in authority. Otherwise, why will a young man say that our army is useless, perhaps, because it has not staged a coup? Why will a law professor say that looking at the economic situation on the ground, Ghana may be ripe for a coup?

Why coup? Why not say that Ghana is ripe for a change of government? Of course, we all know that can only happen after 7th December I will not begrudge anybody if he says that the country is ripe for a change of government. After all, we live in a political culture, where parties juggle for power every four years. That is the beauty of democracy. It is said that when the last ballot is counted, the next campaign begins, so no one can deny the fact that, even now, parties and individuals have begun their campaigns in earnest, though the next elections are still about three years away.

My honest view, however, is that those utterances are not subversionary and should not be construed as such. At best, I view them as reckless statements, which come with the dispensation we have chosen for ourselves. Everything is politicized so much today that one needs to weigh one’s words carefully before uttering them.
In this write-up, I aim to give free consultancy services to those who have suddenly come to the realization that a coup d’etat is the panacea to our problems, as Ghanaians.

I am very much aware of the commentaries citing examples of utterances in the past about the imminence of a coup d’etat and the possibility of “the Arab Spring” in Ghana. How many people took those people seriously at the time? I certainly did not. To me, we are being reminded about those utterances now for the sake of equalization.

This coup-craze has suddenly gained currency because of what has happened in the three West African countries, incidentally all French-speaking countries. However, I expected our numerous security experts to know that what happened in those countries may be due to their military culture. The structure of the militaries in French-speaking countries is different from Ghana.

Every country has a unit, sub-unit, or squad known as the presidential guard, but with the French-speaking countries, the presidential guard is like the president’s personal army. It is often an elite force purposely put in place to protect the president. The personnel are often better armed and given better conditions of service. The commander is often handpicked by the president himself, which may be influenced by tribal affiliations or some other nepotistic consideration.

The presidential guard commander is often more influential than even service commanders. Indeed, service commanders often lobby the presidential guard commanders for favours. That is not the case with our country. Individuals may lobby their way into being deployed at the presidency, especially junior ranks, but as a force, the president has no say in who is deployed there, especially the commanders.

The nearest examples we may have had in Ghana to such powerful units maybe the President’s Own Guard Regiment during the government of President Nkrumah or Flt Lt Rawlings’ Forces Reserve Battalion (FRB) before the advent of the Fourth Republic.

We feared to say it at the time, but the FRB had certain weapons which we “mortal” soldiers had not seen before, even though we belonged to the same armed forces. If you study the recent trends very well, these presidential guards or units often turn out to be the dragon, nurtured by the presidents, which eventually devoured their owners, in the form of coups. Note that it is not the top hierarchies of the armed forces that initiate these takeovers.

Col Mamady Doumbouya, who took over power in Guinea, was the head of the newly formed Special Forces Group. He belongs to the same tribe as former president Alpha Conde and was personally invited by the president to return home from his mission with the French Foreign Legion, where he served for several years, to take up that appointment. He took advantage of that position to oust the president from power.

In the case of Lt Col Paul-Henri Damiba, who is now the President of Burkina Faso, he was a loyalist of former President Blaise Campaore, having served with the Regiment of Presidential Security for many years. He was implicated in the attempted coup of 2015, which briefly deposed the transitional government, but was used as a witness against the other conspirators and left off the hook. Perhaps, to curry his favour or ensure his continued loyalty, he was promoted by former President Kabore last December and appointed commander of the Third Military Region in the capital, Ouagadougou. This was also proof of the president’s trust in him.

However, it was from that strategic position that he staged the coup to remove the former president, taking advantage of some disquiet in the army over poor conditions of service. In the case of Col Assimi Goita, he was the commander of the Autonomous Special Forces Battalion, which was responsible for the security of President Boubakar Keita. Following civil unrest in the country, he led the coup that removed the president from power. He then appointed Bah Ndaw as acting President and Moctar Ouane as Prime Minister, with himself as Vice President, but actually the de facto leader.

He eventually removed the two civilians and made himself president, in the case of the kingmaker making himself king. It is clear from this narrative that in all three countries, the coup makers were close appointees of the presidency. I challenge anybody to cite any such unit we have in our country today.

For those who do not know, a coup is not an overthrow of the party in power or even the president but a subversion of the entire state machinery. It is not an option in our democratic dispensation. The electorate has the opportunity to remove any non-performing government every four years. It is even possible to remove a president before the end of his tenure through impeachment if he flouts the very constitution he swore to uphold.

The military does not come into the equation at all. Who has appointed the military as a form of the senior prefect of the state, to the extent that it can intervene when a government is not living up to expectation? Maybe that is the thinking of those living in the past.

Most Ghanaians, including even our security experts, are so in love with the idea of coups because they don’t know or fail to acknowledge the effect of coups on the populace. I heard one of them asking why the government is scared of the mention of the word “coup”. Given the dynamics of our current dispensation, a coup may well result in a civil war, if we are not careful.

There are too many small arms in unauthorized hands today and any chaos, occasioned by a coup, is likely to pit soldiers against soldiers, soldiers against civilians, and civilians against civilians. In fact, may God forbid, but in the event of an insurrection, fewer soldiers will die as compared to civilians, because soldiers are taught to survive and to die. That is why they rehearse everything in training, including dying. So let us not even contemplate the idea of a coup.

Let me share this interesting story. A friend, Collins (not his real name), once told me that he tried to join the army from his twenties until he reached the mature age of forty years, without success. Today, he is a private security guard and he has vowed that whenever there is a civil war in Ghana, he will become a rebel General to fight the system because he has been denied his life ambition of becoming a soldier. There are many Collinses walking about, waiting for the opportunity to exact vengeance on the world. Let us not tempt fate.

Realistically speaking, a coup in Ghana is farfetched because the periods of liberation, redemption, and revolutions are not likely to surface again. The other day, a certain retired Commodore said that soldiers on their own do not stage coups. It is civilians who goad them into subversionary activities, because civilians are the ultimate beneficiaries of military interventions. Fortunately, the soldier of today is not like that of yesteryear.

The military high command today is made up of very well-educated officers with not just psc and jsc qualifications, but also very high academic accomplishments. Some of them have authored books. I know senior officers who possess three Masters’ degrees, some even Ph.D. holders. There are even Warrant Officers and Senior Non- Commissioned Officers with Masters degrees.

I recall that, in my line of work at the Training Directorate several years ago, even Corporals came for debrief, having completed their first degree courses. The soldier of today cannot therefore easily be hoodwinked by faceless civilians into attempting to destabilize the country and, when caught, be sent to the gallows, while they take a back seat.

As an academic exercise, let me give a Birdseye view of what it means if the coup mongers’ wishes are realized. Parliament is the only arm of government that will suffer when there is any military intervention.

The military adventurers will take over as the Executive arm of government while the Judiciary, even if it comprises kangaroo courts, will still continue to operate. However, there will be no legislature. This will mean that the Speaker and 275 Honorable Members of Parliament will be out of work. The over 600 parliamentary staff will be out of work. The hundreds of contractors and other auxiliary staff will be out of work. Many thousands of others will be affected. That is food for thought.

On a personal note, I still carry painful memories of scenes from several years ago, which not only traumatized me then but give me sleepless nights even today. In 1993, in the rubber plantations in Harbel, Liberia, we saw dead bodies of children, barely 8 to 9 years of age, clutching AK rifles in their lifeless hands.

They should have been in school but they were unleashed on innocent civilians by the rebel leader, Charles Taylor, in his efforts to rule the country and paid the price. In 1994, we saw what has come to be known as the killing fields of Cambodia, then in their early stages of decomposition, before the place was cleaned and shown to the world.

On April 6, 1995, my sub-unit assisted the local authorities in the town of Rwamagana in Rwanda to rebury thousands of bodies that had been thrown into shallow mass graves in the heat of the war ( from excerpts of my book being written). If I have any reason to continue to wage a one-man crusade against strife in this country, this is it.

To conclude, my cry in the wilderness as John (not the Baptist) Fangati Kuzigeyem Bu is that, Ghanaians should say with one loud voice, “No to Coups”. We may have our differences, we may have our ambitions, we may even have our disappointments in the system, but a coup is not the way to go. Let us wait for 7th December every four years and use our thumbs to show any non-performing government the door or retain any government that lives up to our expectations.