By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 26, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I am not familiar with the minute details of the events that nearly led to the booting of Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Kofi Boakye out of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), but it had absolutely nothing to do with the unsavory and inordinate politicization of the GPS, as Mr. Boakye would have Ghanaians believe (See "NPP Nearly Sacked Me - DCOP Kofi Boakye" Vibeghana.com 1/25/15). It had everything to do with the shady and unorthodox methods which our subject allegedly employed in a zealous bid to smoking out notorious drug barons. His methods were so unorthodox that they aroused the genuine suspicions of his superiors who, understandably and promptly, demanded an investigation into his dealings and associations with these anti-social and criminal elements of Ghanaian society.

Indeed, I have a relative who recently retired after serving more than 40 years in the GPS, who was also taught as a senior officer at the Ghana Police Academy (GPA) by the current Asante Regional Police Commander, and who firmly believes that short of a miracle or Divine Intervention, Mr. Boakye will never be named Inspector-General of Police (IGP). Obviously, what this ought to tell any foward-looking Ghanaian is that all is not well or kosher with the Asante Regional Police Commander when it comes to sporting a clean professional record.

According to my relative, who was once named Ghana's Best Detective, having also served with the United Nations' Peacekeeping Force in the Sudan, Mr. Boakye must have been a bit too exuberant for his own good. My relative goes further to say that Mr. Boakye had been hired and trained by the GPS as a laboratory scientist associated with the Criminal Investigations Division of the GPS (CID), but was not professionally trained as a detective, having graduated with a science degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). In essence, Mr. Boakye had, at some point, presumed to play the officially unauthorized role of an undercover detective when he understandably came under the radar of security operatives under the tenure of the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Indeed, anybody who has sedulously followed the history of the security apparatus in the country is well aware of the fact that it was Messrs. Rawlings and Kojo Tsikata who, under the specious guise of revolutionary discipline, politicized and inordinately ethnicized what has now become known as the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), formerly called the Special Branch of the Ghana Police Service, and the general security apparatus of the country, including the GPS and the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF).

Needless to say, from time to time, concerned Ghanaians citizens, from all walks of life, have expressed outrage in the media over the apparently inordinate tribalization and nepotistic politicization of our national security agencies, in particular the GPS and the GAF. And most of such expressions of outrage have occurred under the tenure of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and Mr. Boakye cannot claim to be either ignorant or innocent of such genuine and public expressions of outrage.

Indeed, in his own observation of this patently unsavory state of security affairs in the country, recently, Mr. Boakye alluded to the fact that politicians of both major parties may be equally guilty of this crime. And so it is rather bizarre for him to so jejunely and narcissistically personalize matters by scandalously privileging his own professional run-ins with the law and higher-ups over and above our collective and greater national interests. At any rate, Mr. Boakye's recent pontifical pronouncements on the so-called National Sanitation Day, sheepishly launched by President John Dramani Mahama in the wake of the massive outbreak of the cholera epidemic in the country, makes Mr. Boakye sound more like Mr. Mahama's National Democratic Congress' Asante Regional "Tankasse" or Health Inspector than a professionally trained senior police officer.

On the latter score, Mr. Boakye was widely quoted, recently, to have warned that the monthly sanitation exercises had come to stay, and that he would personally ensure that all shops and markets were shuttered on each and every sanitation observance day. You really want to talk about meritocracy and the inordinate politicization of the Ghana Police Service, Mr. Kofi Boakye? Come on, be my guest!

______________________________________________________________