The new Ministry of National Security
Since our national independence, our National Security has evoked images of police and military personnel – or, sometimes, plain-clothed security operatives – bursting on the scene to conduct operations, including arrests.
Instead of friendly interactions with ordinary citizens in conducting operations quietly and leaving without traces, what we have been treated to traditionally is overt operations and embarrassing noise.
In a political environment in which everybody wants to be visible, the results have most of the time been controversial and demeaning of government’s good intentions.
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That notwithstanding, we have a rich history of intelligence work that has yielded results, including exposing the murderers of the High Court judges, arrests of the Ablekuma youth who murdered a police officer on a beat and the infamous Kibi murder case.
For those who have had the privilege of watching detective films, the saga of a calculated intelligence officer patiently going in and coming out of homes and neighbourhoods, asking all manner of questions and watching the body language of suspects, is refreshing.
But that was yesterday; today, it appears that our operatives are so much in a hurry to be visible that they lose sight of the real jobs assigned to them.
Little wonder that we have backlog of unresolved murder cases – with little hope that we may surmount the challenges today or tomorrow.
Intelligence-driven society
As the experts would affirm, intelligence is not only about the sweat and visibility angles that we saw at Ayawaso West Wuogon and the CitiFM/TV premises. It could also be about exploring our gold, oil or timber reserves to enable us decide how we may manage it for our collective benefit into the next 100 years.
We may also apply intelligence to revamp our national soccer team, the Black Stars, or make boxing a national professional sport to support education in urban poor Accra.
That’s aside of how we could apply intelligence to smoke out bandits along our highways or robbers at Ashaiman and Kasoa. Additionally, we may also apply intelligence to monitor our water bodies like Afram and Lake Bosumtwi; just as we can do with forests and beaches as well as our fertile lands allocated by chiefs for agriculture.
New architecture
As the President intimated, the country’s new national security strategy is expected to stir development and enhance social stability such that the gains of development are not eroded by the actions and inactions of criminal elements.
Particularly around this time when we must ensure that we sustain our food security targets and protect our natural resources, we have a huge responsibility to be vigilant.
That is why the custodians of our new security architecture ought to be a different breed of patriotic citizens who must move away from their bloated fixation with demented opposition politicians. Instead, they need to move to the ground and communities, where crime is becoming cheap by the day, and also where we can tap the relevant human resources to ignite our national transformation agenda.
Vigilant, alert people
The new national security strategy should therefore be vigorously implemented in ways that will enable us rediscover ourselves and make every effort at individual, organisational, institutional and national levels to contribute our quota towards national development.
We therefore urge the Ministry of Information and National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), together with its other state and non-state partners, including our Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives and civil society groups, to ignite the conversation at all layers of our society in creating vigilant state in which we would be accountable to ourselves.
We must move from beautiful documents to vigilant communities and an alert people, sincere citizens and loyal patriots.
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