You Can’t Even Control Our National Security Agencies, Mr. Mahama

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 14, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He hasn’t paid our hardworking teachers, and many other equally diligent civil servants, for more than two years. And yet, President John Dramani Mahama would have Ghanaians believe that the possibility of any terrorist attacks in the country would come from outside. This is more than simply ironic; it is patently and unpardonably absurd. Let me tell you why, my dear reader: this is the same man who recklessly and covertly negotiated an agreement with the United States’ foreign ministry, the State Department, to have two Saudi-born Yemeni terrorists released from the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and flown to Ghana on the blindside of Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho and Mr. Fritz Baffuor, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee just this past January.

Now, President Mahama is telling us that operatives of the National Security Council (NSC) ought not to have leaked news of an imminent terrorist attack by one of the sub-regional affiliates of Al-Qaeda and/or ISIS to the media (See “Terror Alert: No Need to Panic – Mahama” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/14/16). You would have thought that the President would call for a few heads to roll at the top-echelons of whichever security establishment caused such a leak. Indeed, one does not need Prophet T. B. Joshua to predict the possibility of a terrorist attack in the country in the offing; simple common sense ought to point us to such an imminent possibility. If being denied one’s legitimate livelihood by those who have been feeding fat, blindly and recklessly at the expense of the hardworking Ghanaian does not constitute terrorism, I don’t know what else does.
And if the government’s abject negligence of the Ghanaian civil and public servant is no prime recipe for a lethal backlash in the offing, I don’t know what else is. Indeed, what is unfortunate is not the fact that the media should be filled with reports of an imminent terrorist attack in the country, but the fact that it has taken this incredibly long to come to the realization, even as our sages of old had observed time without number in their time, as well as our own, that if you hold a toad/frog under water unduly long, it begins to gurgle.

I also don’t believe that the possibility of a terrorist attack in Ghana would serve to “defuse the notion that only Francophone countries are susceptible to attacks by terrorists,” unless the proponent of such a bogus theory wants his/her audience to believe that Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda are Francophone African countries. What we see here is that the dastardly activities of terrorists thrive best where there is a critical mass of radical Muslims and jihadists. In Uganda, however, that critical mass has been militant fundamentalist Christians, such as members of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army, if memory serves yours truly accurately.

Nearly all the countries listed above have a critical mass of radicalized Muslim jihadists. Ghana has apparently come under the radar of radicalized Islamist terrorists and jihadists because President Mahama, in unwisely introducing Messrs. Al-Dhuby and Bin-Atef into the country from Guantanamo Bay, where they had each been kept under lock-and-key for some 14 years by personnel of the US Navy intelligence apparatus, had open the floodgates of terrorist attacks on Ghanaians. Matters have also not been helped by the fact that we have also had such cynical Mahama human pit-bulls as Mr. Abraham Amaliba vehemently defend the inalienable right of judicially “untried,” albeit forensically sustainably certified, terrorists like Messrs. Al-Dhuby and Bin-Atef to be granted residential guest status in the country.

Not surprisingly, we recently came to the horrific discovery that some 13, or so, Pakistani Muslims have been prowling our small towns and villages preaching Quranic scriptures without the express invitation of any of the country’s recognized Muslim community leaders. A government whose key operatives would virulently accuse a trio of paint-gun-toting legitimately licensed South African security trainers of endangering our national security, can definitely not be excused for being unaware of the eerie and sinister presence of these radical Pakistani jihadists. We also learn of some Yemeni nationals having been arrested and charged with possessing fake Ghanaian passports. Well, there is a tired old Akan maxim which says that “If one consorts with hounds, one gets one’s lips licked by hounds.”

President Mahama has unwisely volleyed Ghana into the orbital tracks of global terrorists and cannot refuse to accept blame squarely and fairly for the same.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs