Joyce Mogtari questions why a 'shithole' country associates itself with US

Joyce Bawa Mogtari, Special Aide to former president, John Mahama

The Special Aide to former President, John Mahama has questioned government why it went ahead to have a military agreement with the United States at a time that President Donald Trump has referred to African states and some Caribbean nations as 'shitholes' countries.

Early this year, President Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shitholes countries”. He made this comments during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House, The Washington Post reported.

According to Joyce Bawa Mogtari, such comments from President Trump were very 'unfortunate' and regrettable where Africans never expected this to have emerged from a leader of a great ally. Her response was to a question I asked the panel "why does the US want to build a military base in a 'shithole' country?"

"Unfortunate comments, uncharacteristic of any American president that we have ever actually encountered, but of course this is a totally different administration. It actually brings into question really why we still want to put aside our national interest, our national sovereignty and subject ourselves regularly to this sort of comments by a leader of a country that we consider as an ally", Madam Mogtari said this during the BBC World Questions debate last Tuesday April 10th at the British Council auditorium, Accra, Ghana.

The host of the debate Jonathan Dimbleby, a veteran BBC broadcaster immediately interrupted and asked if the previous administration, where Madam Mogtari was a member, also surrendered Ghana’s sovereignty when they signed a similar agreement with the US.

On this note, the special aide disagreed and stated that the current military agreement cannot be compared with the current one because it is an 'enhanced agreement'

"On this point Jonathan I think I will disagree. I do think that we do have existing agreements that we do have in the past. In terms of military co-operation, we have always indeed had military co-operation not just with the US, but several other countries. I believe that this particular agreement, as it describes itself in its preamble, is an enhanced agreement, it does contain other portions that separately different from what we have before", she noted.

A member of the panel and president of Mpedigree, Mr. Bright Simmons was of the view that the current military agreement with the US is a substandard one and added that the people at the helm of affairs have not done the right thing for Ghana.

"If you compare the quality of the agreement we have with the US, since 1998, to those that other countries have with the US, ours is not of the requisite quality. So the political elites have to acknowledge that they have not done right by us", Mr. Simmons stated.

Communications minister Ursula Owusu-Ekuful believed that the current military agreement with the US was born out of the increasing number of terrorism in the West African sub-region and therefore there is the need to have better intelligence on the ground in order to protect the country from “transnational organized crimes and terrorist activities”.

“We are living in an increasingly dangerous neighbourhood where there is terrorist activity around us and on our borders in Cote d’Ivoire and in Burkina Faso. We have seen increased military activity, terrorist activity. We may not be able to have the capability on our own to resist that to have forward knowledge or advanced intelligence of those activities. We do need international co-operation to fight transnational organized crimes and terrorist activities”, she said.

The BBC World Questions is a programme designed for citizens in their respective countries to have face to face interaction with members in decision making positions and ask them questions on topical issues that are directly or indirectly facing them.

The writer is a Ghanaian Investigative Journalist
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