NATIONAL SECURITY MUST RE-ORIENT ITS STAFF

Intelligence is based on information and research, which components are used to develop strategies for taking action or choosing available options, depending on the circumstances and the situation, as well as type of goal the institution intends to achieve.

So, we have criminal, business as diplomatic and political, which are aimed at reading competitors, opponents and criminals etc.

In our part of the world, that philosophy is abused to mean protection of the ruling government. So, even it is losing elections, it finds it difficult analyzing the situation because, by its very culture of always trying to appeal to its superiors and political paymasters, instead of cautioning it, it ignores the very issues it was put in place to address.

That was why D. KA Busia, for instance, appointed an enemy; and that why he never anticipated that that enemy could organise other ethnic groupings against his government.

Again, that was why the JAK administration, for instance, did not read into the Tain elections runoff, and ended up having opponents stampede it with a favourable constituency within grasp of winning.

We prefer the overt form of showing where we came from rather than the plainclothes, sleuth style where you can chase the enemy and gather information for centuries, without the enemy suspecting you or changing its game-plan to outwit you [security]. While the overt suits our typical African buccaneering politics it has, most of the time, also been the reason for the removal of governments from power.

It happened to Kwame Nkrumah and it happened, too, to Kutu Acheampong, who survived too many coups that it had to take a palace coup to oust him eventually. But we must also cite Hilla Limann, who sat and watched power slip out of his hands because he couldn’t process information relevantly.

Even in this illegal galamsey canker we had on our hands, intelligence was failed, in our opinion, to tick, otherwise it wouldn’t have taken the European Union to caution us about our dying water bodies, forests etc and, with it, our cocoa and total economic and development partnerships.

That is why we must condemn the Rambo style approach of the national security towards catching an insignificant fly like the young man from Citi TV/FM, who was psychologically roughed up by them.

It was a shame how the national security chaps reacted, even though the journalist may have broken the rules.

Someone must take charge; but we must also learn to reorient our men at the Blue Gate to be in tune with the times.

In the name of God, this is the twenty-first century; not AD 1970. And, this is an Akufo-Addo administration, not Kutu Acheampong, nor JJR of the PNDC era.