Cowards in the Bush: The Binduri Attack Is an Affront to Every Ghanaian

There are moments that strip away all political noise and force a nation to confront a simple, brutal truth. Monday's ambush on a Ghana Armed Forces escort convoy at Binduri is one of those moments.

One hundred and forty civilians. Men, women, perhaps children ordinary Ghanaians trying to travel from Bawku to Bolgatanga. They needed a military escort just to make that journey. That fact alone should shame us all. That they were still not safe, even under armed protection, is nothing short of a national disgrace.

Unknown gunmen and let us be clear, they are not rebels, not freedom fighters, not militants with a cause worth hearing opened fire on that convoy repeatedly. Three civilians are dead. One is injured. Ten are dead in total when you count the assailants the military neutralized. Families have been shattered. And for what?

The Ghana Armed Forces responded with professionalism and courage. Their personnel repelled the attack, pursued the fleeing cowards, and recovered weapons from one who hid shamefully in a mosque. Twenty-one suspects are now in custody. The men and women of the GAF deserve the nation's gratitude. They stood between unarmed civilians and murderous gunfire, and they held that line.

But let us not allow their bravery to paper over the deeper failure this attack represents.

The Bawku enclave has been a tinderbox for years. Ethnic tensions, communal violence, and the steady creep of armed criminality have made this corridor one of the most dangerous stretches of road in Ghana. Residents cannot travel freely.

Commerce is strangled. Schools are disrupted. And the state, for all its interventions, has not been able to restore the basic dignity of safe movement to the people of the Upper East Region.

The MP for Nalerigu/Gambaga, Mumuni Muhammed Nurideen, was right to demand stronger intelligence gathering at the community level. But words of condemnation, however well-meaning, are not enough. Ghana has heard enough condemnations. What the people of Binduri, Bawku, and the wider Upper East need is sustained, strategic, and adequately resourced security not convoy escorts as a permanent way of life.

There is something deeply wrong with a country when its citizens must travel in armed convoys to go about their daily business. It normalizes the abnormal. It signals to communities and to the criminals who prey on them that the state has ceded the ground. Monday's attack was not just violence against 140 civilians. It was a direct challenge to Ghana's sovereignty over its own territory.

The government must treat it as such.
The perpetrators of this attack those killed, those arrested, and those still at large are enemies of the Ghanaian state. Not political opponents. Not community agitators with grievances to negotiate. Enemies. They fired on civilians under military protection. They must be brought to justice swiftly, and the full weight of Ghana's law must fall on them.

More broadly, the security architecture in the Upper East must be rethought. Intelligence networks must be deepened. Community leaders must be empowered and protected as partners in peace. The underlying ethnic and resource tensions that fuel recurring violence must be addressed not with platitudes, but with deliberate, long-term reconciliation efforts backed by real investment in the region.

Ghana is not a country at war. But if we allow Monday's horror to pass with nothing more than a press statement and a handful of arrests, we will be sleepwalking toward becoming one.

Three civilians went to their deaths on a road they should have been able to travel freely. That is not acceptable. It must never be accepted as normal.

Ghana owes them better. Ghana owes the Upper East better.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

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