President Nana Akufo-Addo’s first year in office has been peaceful, President of the National Peace Council, Prof Emmanuel Asante has said.

“Yes, insofar as we have not had any kind of serious upheaval in terms of the destruction of the peace of the land, we would say they’ve done very well in that sense.

“Yes, we have had vigilantism creating havoc here and there but it’s not in the magnitude that one would say because of that there is no peace in the country,” Prof Asante told Francis Abban on Accra-based Starr FM on Thursday, 11 January.

2017 was fraught with about 20 cases of vigilante attacks by groups with affinity to the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Leading many of those attacks were the Delta Force and Invincible Forces. Some members of the Delta Force were taking to court and eventually fined for one of those incidents in the Ashanti Region.

However, Prof Asante believes such violence did not destablise the peace Ghana is enjoying.

“I believe that the officialdom, and I’m talking about Nana Akufo-Addo himself as the president, has come out to speak against this. I am on record to have said that you don’t need the president to ask the police to crack the whip because this is their mandate, they have the responsibility to ensure the rule of law, and, therefore, if the police believe that something is hampering them from doing their job, it is their responsibility to tell the public … but so long as they haven’t come out to say anything of that sort, then we would expect that they would do what is expected of them, and, so, far so good.”

In his view, no country can have total peace.

“I mean you would never get a 100% peaceful situation in any country. We have the penchant to refer to the Americas, to refer to Europeans and those places [for best practices], they would never ever say that they have 100% peaceful conditions, no, even in terms of security and all that in spite of their sophistication and all that, and, therefore it is not possible for us to have that.



“But if you have travelled outside Ghana to some of the West African countries and in some other places, you’ll find that people think that we are peaceful: people can walk on the streets in the night with ease; in some places you cannot do that, and, therefore, even though it is not 100%, we cannot also be thankful to God for the peaceful atmosphere we find ourselves,” Prof Asante said.