Why Mahama chose Aboah as National Security Adviser

True to the New Crusading Guides’s prediction days after the demise of former President John Evans Atta Mills, President John Dramani Mahama has appointed the former Minister for Interior, William K. Aboah, as his National Security Adviser.

A statement issued from the presidency November 30, 2013, said the former police chief was taking over from Brigadier General Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, who has now been nudged to head the Human Security Department of the National Security Council Secretariat.

When asked if Brigadier Nunoo was still the National Security Advisor under the Mahama-led administration, Information Minister, Mahama Ayariga, could not say, offering to give full details later.

However, hours after his name was announced as the security adviser to the first gentleman of the land, experts after experts in security matters have attempted in separate interviews with this paper, to go into the presidents head to speculate on why the former Minister of Interior was chosen to advise the president on issues of national security.

“Well, unlike his predecessor, Brigadier General Nunoo Mensah, who was almost always in the news for one negative comment or the other, Aboah is the laid-back no-nonsense type who hardly speaks. I describe him as the politely scathing boss when he was head of the Police Criminal Investigations Department (CID) in 1999”, one of his students who is now a security capo told this reporter on condition of anonymity.

The paper also gathered that William K. Aboah has tutored virtually everyone that matters in the spying profession in his days as a member of the Regional and National Security Councils.

“The man has long experience in the furnace of resistance to the looting of public funds by the public’s employees. Aboah is an assiduous digger into archives, and for me if there is any appointment the President has made that I am proud of it is this one,” was how one of the Bureau of National Security (BNI) personnel described the former Lecturer in Criminal Law at the Ghana Police College.

But his critic say his handling of the DSP Gifty Tehoda’s case was one of his lowest scores, as till date, no action has been taken on the report by the committee he set up to investigate the petition by the police officer who is now fighting her battle from another angle in court.

At least Ghanaians can now sleep in peace knowing that one of the security capos par excellence is advising the president on security matters.

The last straw that is seeing Brigadier General Nunoo Mensah out of office as the president’s security adviser according to government sources, was his recent distance goal which took striking workers to the cleaners when he asked them (striking workers) to pack and leave the country if they could not sacrifice a little.

The backlash that followed the statement from the two time CDS sent government spokespersons quickly dissociating the government from the comments made by the Brigadier General who was appointed as National Security Advisor in 2009 by the late President John Mills.