By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 29, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

News that all 500 recruits called up for training at the Ghana Armed Forces Training School at Shai Hills, in the Greater-Accra Region, have been sent home for allegedly gross misconduct does not disturb me one bit (See Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/29/15). I have a strong feeling that all the 500 recruits, presumably from diverse backgrounds, cultures and ethnic affiliations, could not be so hopelessly wrong. The rather imperious call by Maj. (Rd.) Derek Oduro, who also sits on the Parliamentary Committee for Defense and the Interior, for the dismissed recruits to be vigorously prosecuted is very comical, to speak much less about the downright farcical.

Maj. Oduro, who is also Member of Parliament for Nkoranza-North, predicates his call on the fact that a remarkable expenditure of government resources has been wasted by the dismissed recruits. For starters, whatever amount of resources was spent on these recruits pales far in significance compared to the GH? 52 million creamed off our national coffers by Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome. And still, this big-time criminal convict has yet to pay a pesewa of his loot back to where it was stolen, let alone spend any appreciable time in the slammer.

We also know why Attorney-General Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong has nervously and outrageously been dragging out Scandal Woyome for this unbearably long. It is, of course, the quite well-known fact that quite a legion of highly placed National Democratic Congress (NDC) operatives are personally mired in this epic heist. Plus the fact that Mr. Woyome is known to be a major NDC underwriter. Indeed, Mr. Woyome has publicly stated that if those in powerful cabinet positions who generously benefited from his theft did not shut up or stop pretending as if they were more morally righteous than their benefactor, he would not hesitate to spill the beans, as it were.

We must also recall the fact that when the Woyome scandal first came to national attention, then-President John Evans Atta-Mills publicly offered this Mega-Thief and professional scam-artist his official and personal blessings prior to his passing some three-and-half years ago. Needless to say, the proprietary stance taken by Maj. Oduro to ensuring that all 500 recruits dismissed by the Ghana Armed Forces are vigorously prosecuted is thus nothing short of the scandalously absurd. It goes without saying that the Nkoranza-North MP is so mean-spiritedly picking on these small fries precisely because they are vulnerable or “easy pickings,” as New Yorkers are wont to say.

If Maj. Oduro really cares to know, what really needs to be done here is for Parliament to call for a thorough review of the method by which new members are recruited for training by Ghana Armed Forces, and also the sort and quality of training that probably caused these recruits to allegedly rebel against their trainers and commanders. For instance, were these young men and women recruited on the basis of political suasion or ethnicity, as was shamefully witnessed in the airlifting of purported Ghanaian cheerleaders and staunch supporters of our senior national team, the Black Stars, during the 2014 World Cup tournament in Brazil?

I also vehemently disagree with Maj. Oduro that the history of the Ghana Armed Forces, at least since the Rawlings-led 1979 bloody mutiny, has been exemplary in terms of discipline and professionalism. On the latter count, the Ghana Armed Forces is squarely ranked on the same dismal level as those of our sub-regional neighbors like Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and Gambia. As far as many of avid observers and students of Ghanaian politics and culture can tell, Nigeria may be the only country in West Africa with a professionally disciplined Armed Forces, when it comes to a strict observation of the proverbial pecking order.

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