Review Recruitment Into Armed Forces

A retired Commandant of the Ghana Military Academy, Major-General Henry Kwami Anyidoho, has bemoaned the recent involvement of security personnel in criminal activities and advocated a review of the recruitment and training methods of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF).

Referring to reports of uniformed men misconducting themselves in instances involving robbery and other vices, he said, “It is lamentable when young officers, who are expected to be imbued with the qualities of a professional soldier, go to the extent of misconducting themselves.”

Major-General Anyidoho made the call when he delivered a lecture at the Burma Hall in Accra to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of the Ghana Military Academy.

The lecture was on the theme, “Ghana Military Academy: Past, Present and Future”.

He said increasingly, the officer corps seemed to be losing their image before the public, despite the fact that an increasing number of graduates had been enlisted into the GAF.

“It is quite regrettable that entry into the academy seems no more based on the love for the military profession,” he noted.

He said, for effective recruitment and training to be carried out, it was imperative that the course packages at the Ghana Military Academy were modified, so that it did not reflect too much the British system but localised to meet Ghanaian needs.

That, he said, would enable the training to be truly reflective of and in harmony with the aspirations of the officers and make them better fit for their roles as leaders of men in the GAF.

Major-General Anyidoho said in spite of the sterling performance of some officers from the Military Academy, there was the need to carry out forensic audit of the system of training in order to find out the causes of the decline in the quality of officers who graduated from the academy in recent times.

He said the Ghana Military Academy should continue to be the sound foundation of the officer corps, producing officers who had passed through a rigorous selection process but not through any biased and discriminatory programme.

He asked that the selection process should be devoid of favouritism, political manoeuvring and ethnicity.

Major-General Anyidoho called on those administering the Ministry of Defence to ensure that resettlement opportunities were created by way of strengthening the various educational systems within the Armed Forces and exploring new avenues to make officers marketable, even outside the barracks.

In a speech read on his behalf, the Minister of Defence, Lt General Henry Smith (retd), stressed the need to strengthen the foundation upon which the leadership of the GAF was built, stressing that should start with the Ghana Military Academy.

He said the government would continue to support the academy and the GAF in all ways possible to ensure that the military played its assigned role effectively.