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Production of National Security Strategy Document Puts Akufo-Addo Well Ahead of the Pack

Feature Article Production of National Security Strategy Document Puts Akufo-Addo Well Ahead of the Pack
JUL 28, 2021 LISTEN

One would have expected that it would have been the Cuba- and Libya-leaning junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), led by the late Chairman Jeremiah John “Abacha 5 Million” Rawlings and his maternal cousin Capt. Kojo Tsikata (Ret.), who, like the Castro Brothers, Fidel and Raul, would have crafted and bequeathed Ghana with a National Security Strategy (NSS) Document. Ironically but not altogether surprisingly, we are now reliably informed that it is rather the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) that has, finally, succeeded in drafting or crafting a National Security Strategy Document to enable the most famous and oldest Modern West African Country or Nation successfully fight criminal activities, both domestically and externally.

This comes virtually as a matter of course or as something that is all to be expected of the most mature, progressive, dynamic and visionary Fourth Republican Ghanaian Leader. But that the NSS Document comes at a time when the West-African Subregion has been experiencing quite a considerable degree of terrorism and other forms of nation-wrecking criminal activities on the uptick, makes this document all the more significant, relevant, worthwhile and praiseworthy or laudable, the word that I was really thinking about. It is all the more ironic because for at least one generation, Ghanaians were told that the Tsikata reconfigured Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), formerly called the Special Branch of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), was the most security-conscious of its kind in Ghana’s postcolonial history, if not the history of the entire West-African Subregion.

Now, it turns out that like most Rawlings-Tsikata formulations, such talk had been a sheer propagandistic hogwash and a self-serving attempt to hoodwink Ghanaians into having a false sense of a cohesive national security system or setup. We are also reliably informed that like all of its predecessors, the Rawlings Revolutionaries, so-called, were mere National Security Reactionaries. In other words, until President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s auspicious residency at Jubilee House, formerly briefly renamed Flagstaff House by the populist and military-minded leaders of the National Democratic Congress, Rambo-minded, some critics would even say, Ghanaians literally went to bed starkly naked with their feet hanging outside their homes.

This landmark achievement is also none the least bit surprising, especially when one reckons the fact that it was also the now-President Akufo-Addo who, as Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, under the tenure of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, single-handedly and single-mindedly, as well, crafted the equally landmark and historic Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, a veritably barbaric instrument of torture under British colonial domination used to effectively reduce Ghanaians and other British subjects in the other British colonial possessions, so-called, around the globe to the abject subhuman status of veritable slaves or items of chattel. In short, the unmistakable contention here is that President Akufo-Addo could be aptly and accurately described as the undisputed Father of Fourth Republican Ghanaian Democracy.

In the recent past, however, I had been of the grossly mistaken belief that this accolade and honorific properly belonged to the man in whose lackluster government, in retrospect and relatively speaking, of course, Nana Akufo-Addo very ably and competently served as both the Government’s Chief Lawyer and Defender of the Constitutional Rights of the Ghanaian People. Lackluster government because other than the admittedly landmark and auspicious implementation of National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which, by the way, the same architect sinisterly and mischievously colluded and collaborated with the leaders of the National Democratic Congress, chief among them the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, to effectively dismantle and royally bungle, there is little else of practical value, use and relevance that can be proudly and admirably pointed to as one of the major lasting legacies of the John Agyekum-Kufuor government.

Even on the latter count must be emphatically observed that but for the Two-Billion Dollars’ Worth of Nana Akufo-Addo’s all-too-enlightened decision to resuscitate a totally expired and bankrupt National Health Insurance Scheme, there would remain today scarcely any palpable or tangible and perceptible traces of the Kufuor era on Ghana’s political landscape. As well, so far, contrary to what National Security Analysts like Mr. Saani Adib would have the rest of us avid students and observers of Ghana’s political landscape believe, the National Security Strategy Document is being effectively and successfully tested all over the country with a few expected human errors here and there, especially in places like Ejura, in the Asante Region, and the Upper-West Regional Capital of Wa (See “Security Analyst Doubts Implementation of National Security Strategy Document” Modernghana.com 6/8/21).

There are, of course, bound to be fits and starts, glitches and hitches here and there in the inescapably fallible realm of the strictly and purely human. Bravo, Dear Little Man from Kyebi! Nana, you are simply inimitably fantastic, conspicuously avoidable managerial flaws and all. Corruption definitely has other parents besides Adam and Eve. My profound apologies to Uncle Kofi Diawuo.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 21, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]

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