Reappointment of Kan Dapaah bad - Adam Bonah

A Security Analyst Adam Bonah has expressed a dissenting view on the president’s decision to reappoint Albert Kan-Dapaah as minister-designate for National Security.

According to Adam Bonah, Kan-Dapaah failed to perform his duties well as the National Security Minister during his first tenure in office.

He said this in an interview with Martin Asiedu Dartey on TV3, Friday, January 12.

Mr Bonah criticized the National Security Minister-Designate on the heels of the backlash against the use of the military to guard certain individuals and installations in the last four(4) years which wasn’t the case before.

“We have certain national security since the last four or five years that has not done what is expected when the National Security Minister-Designate was vetted, he said he briefed the president consistently but you can see, his aura looks like the military are doing well now because they are doing what is required and then our trust for the military has gone up. As against the police and other security organizations, it has rather failed, which I think is an indictment on the National Security Minister-Designate, so we need to have a broader conversation with regards to the performance of the military” he charged.

When asked about the view a lot of people hold that the President can review some of the laws to create a proper designation for some of this military personnel to perform the same duties without being in military uniform, in order to differentiate their purpose to put concerned minds at ease, Mr Bonah said: “The President is always the Commander-In-Chief of the Ghana armed forces.

“He is the reason why that is so categorical but when it comes to the police, do we have enough security analysts and even the police and those in academia, CSOs have had this conversation, that the police IGP and the rest should not be actually appointed by the president, because at the moment it looks like the trust for the police have dipped so low that every Tom, Dick, and Harry is looking for a military officer, we could have probably the value of the military have been pushed so wide so much so that we seem to be having some conflict among them, where we have the military always performing the functions of the police and we cannot blame them.”

“I say that, for the military, if you even asked the police, sometimes they don’t even know where they are going to, I always say if you put people who don’t have the technical know-how and are not willing to learn in charge of National Security, these are the consequences.

“And in the last four years, we have had an unprecedented number of military deployments because probably the value of the military has gone up as against civilian police who are supposed to function policing functions because we have a certain Kan Dapaah we all think should not have been re-appointed but unfortunately, the President has his own reasons to appoint him and I hope that parliament will not approve him also but as far as I’m concerned, this discussion is not going to go away if we don’t sanitize the National Security” he charged.