Our Security Agencies: If the Risk Is the Same, Why Is the Reward Not?

Ghanafuor, picture two men at two o'clock in the morning.

The first is a soldier at a border post near Hamile, rifle on his shoulder, watching a track that runs into Burkina Faso. The second is a police constable at a barrier on the Accra to Kumasi highway, torch in one hand and a stranger's documents in the other, in the rain. Both are cold. Both are tired. Both have left a wife and children asleep in a room far from where they stand. If a vehicle comes through that barrier carrying men who mean to kill them, both of them will be shot at with the same intent, and neither of them will be asked first what his payslip says.

Yet the payslips are not the same. That is the plain injustice we keep walking past, and it is time we said it in one sentence. Every person who puts on a Ghanaian uniform and swears to defend this republic should be paid on the same scale, and should retire on the same pension, as the soldier.

Let no one hear this as an attack on the military. Our soldiers are not overpaid. They carry the heaviest liability the state can place on a citizen, they go where they are sent, and they have died in the north and in the Sahel for all of us. The argument is not to take anything from them. It is to stop pretending that the risk they carry is unique, when every prison officer at Ankaful, every fireman at Circle, every immigration officer on the Aflao road and every policeman at Kasoa is carrying a version of the same risk, with a smaller promise at the end of it.

What does the law already say? More than we admit.

When Parliament passed the National Pensions Act in 2008, it set a four year clock for the old parallel schemes to be folded into the three tier system, and it carved out one exemption in the statute itself: the Armed Forces. Later, in 2023, Parliament amended the Act again, and the National Pensions Regulatory Authority's own working paper describes what that amendment did in plain terms. It exempted the security agencies from unification. So the country has twice accepted, in law, that the people who carry guns on behalf of the state should not be left to the mercy of a scheme designed for clerks.

But exemption is not equality. Being spared from something is not the same as being given what your brother is given. And that is where the silence begins, because once the law has exempted everybody, nobody has to publish what anybody actually receives.

The budget, however, is a public document, and it tells us what we value when we are forced to choose.

In the 2026 Budget, the Ministry of Defence was allocated GH¢10.77 billion, an increase of about sixty nine per cent in a single year. The Ministry of the Interior, which carries the Ghana Police Service, the Ghana Prisons Service, the Ghana National Fire Service, the Ghana Immigration Service and the Narcotics Control Board, was allocated GH¢12.58 billion, and its allocation was cut by roughly eight to nine per cent. Set the two facts beside each other. The Army is about fifteen thousand five hundred people. The Police Service alone is about fifty thousand, and the Minister for the Interior, Muntaka Mohammed-Mubarak, told Parliament's Public Accounts Committee on 20 October 2026 that the service needs between seventy and eighty thousand.

I am not so simple as to say that the defence budget is a salary bill. Much of that increase is retooling, helicopters, drones, vehicles and the hardware of a modern army, and nobody should begrudge a soldier good equipment. But the shape of a budget is a confession. When the state decides that a threat deserves money, it finds the money. It found sixty nine per cent more for defence in one year. It cut the Interior in the same year. The message to a constable reading the newspapers is not complicated, and he reads the newspapers.

Then there is the quiet disparity that nobody discusses, because it happens far away and is paid in dollars. And here I must correct a thing that is said too often, myself included, because any reader with a cousin in the Police Service will catch it at once.

Our police do serve on these missions. Ghana established a Formed Police Unit in 2015 and sent it first to South Sudan, and in December 2018 one hundred and sixty five of its officers were honoured for the year they spent protecting displaced families in Bentiu. The United Nations pays for the police exactly as it pays for the troops, at the same rate of US$1,474.68 per person per month from 1 July 2026.

The disparity is not in the rate. It is in the odds.

At the end of October 2025, Ghana had 2,215 troops and 295 police on United Nations operations, 267 of them in formed police units and 28 as individual officers. Set against some fifteen thousand five hundred soldiers and some fifty thousand police, that is roughly one soldier in seven who can go, and roughly one police officer in a hundred and seventy.

What that does to a household is simple and cruel. For a soldier, the mission allowance is a stage in a career, something he plans around and expects. For a police officer it is a lottery that may never call his number, and so the budget in a constable's house depends on whether a selection board in Accra remembered his name. Same government, same oath, same risk when the shooting starts, and one man's income is a career while the other man's is a chance.

So let us put the moral case where it belongs. The bullet does not check your service number before it enters your body. The widow of a policeman in Nsawam should not receive a smaller lump sum, and a smaller monthly pension, and a different answer about her children's school fees, than the widow of a soldier in Kamina, only because her husband wore blue instead of camouflage. Grief is not paid in camouflage. Neither should be compensation.

Now let me deal honestly with the objection, because it is a serious one and it will be raised. Ghana cannot afford to pay fifty thousand police, and every other uniformed officer, at the military rate. That is true. The fiscal space is narrow, the wage bill is already heavy, and the base pay negotiations for 2027 are about to begin under a Fair Wages and Salaries Commission that is itself in transition to an Independent Public Emoluments Commission, with the enabling bill expected in Parliament by November 2026.

But affordability is an argument about pace, not about principle, and there are two costs being confused here. The first is the cost of paying people properly. The second is the cost of not paying them properly, and we are already paying that one, quietly, every day. We pay it in a police service that is twenty to thirty thousand officers short and cannot fill the gap because training schools are full and financial clearance is not. We pay it in a recruitment portal that drew about three hundred and ninety thousand applicants by March 2026 for four services, which is not a sign of attractive conditions, it is a sign of a country with no other door. We pay it in officers who leave after ten years, trained at public expense, for a job that pays them on time. And we pay it in the corrosive idea, now half believed in every market and checkpoint in this country, that a man in uniform must look after himself because the state will not look after him.

A country that underfunds its watchmen eventually pays for what they become.

So here is what I would ask of the government, and I would ask it in the same breath as the money.

First, one review for the whole uniformed service, not five. The incoming Independent Public Emoluments Commission should conduct a single job evaluation across the Army, the Police, the Prisons, the Fire Service, the Immigration Service and the Customs division, and set relativities by measured risk, hours, exposure and the likelihood of disability, rather than by which ministry happens to hold the budget vote.

Second, publish the numbers. An annual security sector emoluments report, showing per rank pay and per rank pension computation for each service. If the figures are already equal, publishing them costs almost nothing and settles the argument forever. If they are not equal, then the country is entitled to know, and the officer at the barrier is entitled to know too. Sunlight first, then negotiation.

Third, a common pension floor. One formula and one retirement age for the uniformed services, with a guaranteed minimum, and a properly funded scheme with published actuarial reporting, so that no officer's old age depends on which Act exempted him from what.

Fourth, equal death and disability benefits. The same lump sum, the same survivor's pension and the same support for the children, whether the officer fell in a forest, in a prison riot, in a fire, or on a highway. The state should not be able to save money by choosing the colour of the coffin's escort.

Fifth, a risk allowance applied by exposure and not by institution. Border duty, galamsey towns, highway patrols, overcrowded prisons and the northern frontier should attract a published allowance paid to the person doing the work, whichever service sent him there. The number of police slots on peacekeeping missions should also be published every year beside the Army's, because a benefit that only one service in seven can reach is not a benefit, it is a privilege.

Sixth, phase it and cost it openly. Three budget years, one published actuarial cost, one line in the main estimates. A reform announced in a supplementary estimate and forgotten by the next one is not a reform, it is a photograph opportunity.

Ghanafuor, this is not a small thing and it is not a party matter. Every government in this Fourth Republic has promised our uniformed services that it would look into their conditions, and every one of them has discovered that looking into costs nothing. What the country needs now is not another committee. It needs a date, a number and a published comparison.

A word to the wise: the man who guards your sleep at two o'clock in the morning should not have to wonder, at sixty, whether his country remembers him. Pay him as you pay the soldier. Then the country will have kept faith with all of them at once.