Ghana's Security Threat Doesn't Carry a Gun, It's Online

Almost two years ago now, I wrote a piece titled "Ghana's Security: A Nation on the Slippery Slope to Instability". It was an intelligence driven article, born less out of ambition than obligation, the kind of duty a patriot feels when he sees smoke before anyone else smells fire. My aim was simple: to educate the public, and to place the truth, without embellishment, in front of the people entrusted with our national security.

That piece landed in an election year, and in Ghana, an election year has a way of swallowing every warning whole. Genuine concerns get filed away as campaign noise, background static in a season already full of it. Two years have passed since then. There is no election to hide behind this time, and yet the very threats I mapped out in that article are no longer theoretical. They are here, visible, palpable and unfolding in real time in front of a country that is still, largely, watching from the sidelines.

In that earlier piece I traced three threads that I believed could unravel our stability if left untouched: illegal mining, known locally as galamsey, ethnic tension migrating online, and human trafficking operating with a sophistication we had not seen before. None of these threats has cooled. Galamsey, in particular, has hardened from an environmental nuisance into something closer to an armed insurgency, its actors now bold enough, and equipped enough, to face down the very security forces sent to stop them. Human trafficking has followed a similar trajectory, with people trafficked into the country to feed cybercrime operations, and Ghanaians trafficked out under false promises of honest work, some of them ending up, unwittingly, on foreign battlefields.

It is the third thread, though, that I want to pick up again here, because recent events have shown just how fast it can catch light: ethnic and religious tension, incubated online, and increasingly spilling over into the streets.

A peace held together by restraint
Ghana carries a quiet pride in being among the few nations in sub Saharan Africa never to have suffered a terrorist attack. That record is not an accident. It is the product of tolerance, religious, tribal and social, practised daily by ordinary people who have simply chosen to get along. But tolerance is not the same thing as immunity, and it is worth saying plainly what our peace actually is: fragile. It always has been. In a country built from many peoples, many tongues and many faiths, peace survives only for as long as restraint does. And restraint, in the digital age, is under a kind of pressure it has never faced before.

This past week gave us a case study in exactly that pressure. An Islamic cleric took to social media and called for anyone who insulted the Prophet Muhammad to be beheaded, adding, chillingly, that this should hold even if the person carrying it out were later arrested by the police. He has since been taken into custody. His justification traced back to a Christian pastor who had made derogatory remarks about the Prophet online, remarks the cleric framed as grounds for retaliation from within his own community.

Whatever one makes of the original insult, and it is plainly wrong to disparage a figure revered by billions, a call to behead someone is not religious conviction. It is extremist speech, and a criminal act. None of this is new to Ghana. Social media has long functioned as an accelerant for this kind of rhetoric, spreading it further and faster than any pulpit or platform ever could. The public condemnation that followed was welcome, but measured against the size of the problem, it was little more than a shrug.

A security posture built for yesterday's threats

Our default setting on security is reactive. We tend to wait, almost by instinct, for the incident before we build the response, rather than reading the signals that precede it. Meanwhile, hate speech aimed at rival ethnic, religious and tribal groups continues to circulate freely online, and it has not stayed there. There are already documented cases of digital hostility crossing over into physical confrontation between communities. Yet the institutions with the mandate to intervene in this space have, for the most part, stayed quiet.

What troubles me most is how much of this seems to be happening outside the field of view of the people meant to be watching. Many of the officers and officials charged with our security appear genuinely unaware of how far the threat landscape has moved, still oriented toward the visible and the physical while an entire new terrain, borderless, fast moving and difficult to police, opens up around them. There is no coherent policy on online extremism to speak of, and precious little appetite to build one. The imam and pastor episode did, to its credit, jolt some of our institutions into a reaction. But a reaction is not a strategy, and our peace grows a little more fragile every time we let intolerance pass unanswered.

Ghana does not have a strong record of clawing back ground once it has been lost. We need only look at our economy for proof of that. In the late 1950s, Ghana stood shoulder to shoulder with, and in some respects ahead of, countries like Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. Decades on, those countries have gone on to become some of the most developed economies in the world, while we are still finding our footing. That is the pattern with us. We fall behind, and we rarely find our way back to the front. It is not a habit we can afford to repeat with our security.

In every piece I have written where I sensed danger gathering, I have tried never to leave the warning standing alone, without something practical attached to it. It remains one of my quiet frustrations that this kind of work, open source intelligence, gathered simply by an ordinary citizen paying close attention, so rarely finds its way into the rooms where security planning actually happens. Still, in that same spirit, here is what I believe needs to change.

Toward a more proactive posture
The police service and the wider intelligence community need to shift from watching the digital space to actively working it, monitoring and acting against the individuals, bloggers and pages that traffic in hate and extremism, rather than waiting for the next headline to force their hand.

Government should invest properly in training its officers, particularly those less at home in digital environments, in how online extremism actually behaves: how it spreads, who it recruits, and where it tends to surface first. This is not a threat that resembles the ones our institutions were originally designed around, and treating it as though it does will keep leaving us exposed.

Government should also be willing to say, without hedging, that this threat now sits alongside, and in some respects surpasses, the more familiar security concerns that dominate our national conversation, and follow that acknowledgement with a genuine, sustained public awareness effort.

Religious and ethnic leaders, meanwhile, hold ground that no security agency can occupy on their behalf. The imam and pastor episode has already left real resentment between segments of each community, and that needs tending to quickly, through visible, joint peace building in the short term, and a longer, more patient programme of interfaith and intercommunal dialogue beyond it.

I will close where I began two years ago. It is time we placed proactive, intelligence led thinking at the centre of how we plan for national security, and set aside the reactive habits that have served us so poorly for so long. The alternative, waiting for the next incident to teach us what we already know, is a luxury a country with a peace this fragile can no longer afford.

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