Human Security is National Security

I can understand your mild discomfort with such a sweeping statement - that "human security is national security" I mean.

After all if we were to loosen the bounds of what constitutes "national security" to the extent that the title of this brief article appears to be suggesting, would there not be a real risk of us putting "everything" into the bracket of state control, and thus fostering an intrusive system that shall snoop around in the nooks and crannies of our little lives under the pretence of looking after us?

I get your point. But there is a sense in which the process of development in materially poor countries such as ours tends to align quite well with a notion of security somewhat loosely defined. And note that I chose the phrase "human security", and not "human development" - a term much beloved by UN Agencies and perceived by them and their acolytes to be nearly all-encompassing of individual and communal requirements for dignity, peace and sustenance.

There are two levels of this analysis, and, coincidentally, I also intend to cite two case studies.

The first level of analysis aims to make the point that human security IS national security. The second is phrased in normative terms, i.e. human security OUGHT to be national security in Ghana. But the fundamental insight remains the same from whichever level you approach the subject. Given the limited capacity of state institutions, and the near total inability of the state itself to provide anything significant in the way of welfare for its citizens, it should not surprise us if localized droughts in parts of the North spill over into ethnic fault-lines and threaten to destabilize that entire geographic belt of the country.

We should not be surprised because "systemic state incapacity" means that the insecurity of a few individuals or communities SHALL be exacerbated whenever preventive measures fail to keep pace with emerging risks. In simple terms, the poverty of the central state creates a vacuum which must be filled by improvised arrangements of organized local violence.

The above argument is an obvious one. The discussion gets more nuanced when issues of safety and generalized insecurity enter the picture. The same incapacity of the state is at play here but the localized responses to the vacated state are subtler than the raw violence that announces itself with fanfare in our chieftaincy disputes and protracted landguard clashes.

It is here that I must introduce my first example. When the Foreign Affairs Ministry was consumed by fire a few weeks ago, the police understandably felt a need to eliminate arson as a potential cause through the due process of investigation.

Particularly since the incident had come in the wake of a similar if also far smaller incident in the Information Ministry building. In the weeks following, we have witnessed serious fire outbreaks at various government offices such as the National Commission for Civic Education and, if a very recent report is accurate, the Electoral Commission premises. Indeed, there has been a string of incidents of similar nature all over the country though not all of them have enjoyed the same level of media attention.

What I find interesting is that in each of these incidents, a reference, whether as part of a circulating rumour or in an official statement, has been made to faulty air conditioners.

Now, one would be perfectly justified in dismissing any hint of a sinister pattern and quite sensible in attributing the remarkable coincidence in the apparent cause of these fires to a less systemic phenomenon such as the poor training of electricians in Ghana (or of those specializing in refrigerants). Such an argument would not suffer for want of evidence.

The lack of accreditation mechanisms for our artisans, most of whom work and train outside the formal polytechnic and technical institutions, would be a clear and sound example of such evidence.

In choosing to see the "air conditioner" issue in a more "suspicious" way, my analysis will be doing justice, finally, to the title of this article. National security is a process of sophisticated paranoia. It is sophisticated because it rises above cheap, sectarian, strife to forge a patriotic, all-encompassing, agenda, even while it operationalises the use of "informed suspicion" in the art of reading beyond the obvious.

In that light I shall take wanton liberties to suggest a lead for the investigators of the recent spate of fires in sensitive locations. My process of speculation shall be informed by the context of employing national security logic to what is quite understandably better framed in human security terms, for its relation to the safety and material needs of our people. The lead I am inclined to suggest is "fake air conditioners".

Consider the possibility, dear reader, that sometime in the recent past, a merchant of some standing in the eyes of the Public Service won a contract to procure air conditioners for a number of public institutions.

Somehow, this merchant placed orders with a distributor who, perhaps unknown to said merchant, is an established conduit for the entry of fake and counterfeit electrical and electronic equipment into Ghana, leading over time to the proliferation of such counterfeit items in sensitive places. Without a certain level of paranoia, are safety investigators ever likely to pursue this line of inquiry? And yet within the security services the chief mantra is that "all are guilty until proven innocent".

To demonstrate that such a chain of logic would be perfectly in order, consider the widely accepted notion that counterfeit aircraft parts are a significant cause of airplane crashes in recent times (see this article: http://news.aol.com/article/yemeni-plane-crash/549252, and also enter the key words "fake aircraft parts" into your favourite search engine).

How easy would it not have been to blame such counterfeit-induced incidents on pilot error, turbulence/visibility and standard equipment failure?

The point being made here is a straightforward one. In countries such as ours where state institutions, which include quality and safety assurance agencies, tend to be severely under-resourced, preventive measures are critical, and they are most effective when they "presuppose systemic failure". It would not be prudent to assume that existing systems, "in their ordinary course of delivery", will safeguard the safety and security of our citizens.

This brings me to my last example: the ongoing registration of citizens for a national, biometric, ID card, which is being conducted without the necessary degree of sophisticated paranoia and preventive tact.

I was horrified to hear an officer of the National Identification Authority mention "body language" as one of the mechanisms for establishing nationality during the ID card registration process on Peace FM recently.

Quite clearly somebody is not connecting the fact that "biometric systems" create a deep sense of reliability with the fact that such systems also foster an ease of penetration which in the wrong hands can afford wide-ranging flexibility for a perpetrator of crime in our increasingly networked Ghana.

Nor is it clear to some people that once the biometric database itself is corrupted, the assurance mechanism - represented by the cards - becomes a threat to the businesses, public agencies and individuals who, having been lured into a false sense of security, could now be exposed to all manner of fraud and abuse.

Quite clearly, someone is not approaching this exercise with the right level of sophisticated paranoia. Perhaps it is a matter of poor resource allocation. But, in the first place, should a country as materially challenged as Ghana be running as many as five, separate, national biometric/electronic schemes? National ID Card. National Voter ID Card. Biometric Passport. Health Insurance Card. Ezwich.

As my colleagues and I have questioned time without number: why not consolidate these projects into a "national biomelectronic backbone" on which a myriad of services ranging from banking to passports to health can draw? Apart from resource rationalization, security enhancement is likely to be the result of this more sophisticated-preventive approach.

The point is actually very simple: in countries such as ours you don't get many chances to get it right, so when it comes to the safety and wellbeing of our citizens it is best that things are approached from a preventive perspective, and that we act as if the very continued existence of our young nation state is at stake.

Slack a little and everything could come crumbling down.