Rawlings Rejects Police Bodyguards

The former head of state has refused to stay out of the news. He is either attempting to kill all the mosquitoes in Africa or creating the impression that without him Ghana cannot survive. He has just arrived from a foreign trip and has already started creating problems for the Ghana Police Service, an institution charged with the responsibility of providing him with security.

The issue over his security has raged on for sometime now and just as Ghanaians have confined it to the bowels of the country's history it has surfaced again. The man has refused to allow Policemen detailed to secure his residence. He was displaying his usual maverick traits when he asked them to go away. Not knowing what to do they just stood around the threshold of the Ridge residence. It would be recalled that Jerry Rawlings the man whose twenty years of running the affairs of this country was terminated by Ghanaians last December requested that soldiers should provide him with security instead of Policemen.

This did not go down well with the National Security operatives who saw in that arrangement an irony since the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces himself is guarded by the Police and not soldiers. The new administration is against the usurpation of Police functions by the military. Such internal arrangement for law and order which is a Police function has for the past twenty years been performed by the military which is at variance with international norms. The military supports the Police only when the latter is unable to contain an internal security duty as in the case of a general break- down of law and order.

The recent Nima riot was a case in point where the military was called in to offer support to the civil Police. The arrangement offers a needed relief and time to soldiers to concentrate on the much needed training which is the hallmark of a serious military establishment. Rawlings' request for some 120 soldiers to offer him security turned him into a laughing stock recently on radio stations. Many callers concluded that he was suffering from delusions of past grandeur.