1320 Security Men Dismissed

...800 National Security, 100 Police, 420 Army Recruits

The recent change of political guard in a Ghana of 52 years has brought in its wake a freeze on the operations of approximately 800 National Security personnel, a100 Police capos, 420 Armed Forces recruits and a mass of Foreign Service Personnel thought to be in three digit figures.

Painfully, this experience has happened in a nation-state where society’s interdependence on bread winners knows no ebb in spheres ranging from the payments of siblings’ school fees right through to funding funeral budgets. Altogether, information pieced together by THE SUN points to a freeze on 800 or so National Security personnel for one reason or the other, obviously because the current dispensation is not comfortable enough finding room for them in the present scheme of things.

Also thought to be in that hot, boiling soup of trouble are a 100 Police personnel who were drivers and body guards to former Ministers of state, now temporarily retired from the heart of executive political power, at least for the next four years. Then follows the case of the 420 young and able-bodied lads, who were only recently recruited into the Ghana Armed Forces under the last government, who have been dispersed to various neighbourhoods within the regions under the strangest circumstances as out-and-out civilians yet again. Even the officer who handled the recruitments, a Col. Kwabena Damoah, a native of the Brong Ahafo region is almost on his last hours of proceeding on forceful retirement. His crime? Well no-one knows except that suspicions fly helter-skelter as regards his political leanings. However THE SUN’s major headache which is gradually growing into a migraine is that, with the energies of these gentlemen and women sitting idle and cold, will harm, in concert with other agents not plot schemes and evil machinations whose overall negative effects should be felt by the larger society? So far no plausible reasons have been supplied expectant individuals so bothered, even though political inclinations are being read into the freezes all around.

Also thought to be affected is the recent crop of personnel recruited by the Foreign Service in triple digit figures. The powers-that-be have since frozen their appointments on the flimsiest of excuses and may never really get a look-in under the present dispensation.

So far, the ruling Party’s officers have been tight-lipped but what remains to be seen is whether there will be any truism in the rumour mill to the effect that have pro-government recruits from every Constituency in the nation, are to be drafted to replace all those frozen numbers.

“That should be substituting polarization with polarization, just as robbing Peter to pay Peter”, one very disturbed member of the public told THE SUN.