ISIS Is In Ghana So What?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

August 27, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

ISIS has been in Ghana for a very long time, and it is only the clinically naive and hopelessly hypocritical who pretend that the apparently active recruitment of Ghanaian youths into the infamous terrorist organization known as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is either new or one that ought to provoke shock and/or national outrage. In Ghana, the establishment of ISIS began long before its most recent reincarnation across the Arab and Islamic world. It began when the Chairman Jerry John Rawlings-led "revolution" of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the populist junta, renamed and restructured the former Special Branch of the Ghana Police Service (GPS), also briefly renamed the Ghana Police Force (GPF), as the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), with his kin and clansman, the notorious Nkrumah-cashiered Capt. Kojo Tsikata, as his Head of National Intelligence.

Like the mythologically roseate Islamic Caliphate of Baghdad of medieval times after which fashion the ISIS leaders intend to create a modern Islamic empire, Chairman Rawlings and Capt. Tsikata intended to establish a pro-Soviet Cuban-style socialist utopia in Ghana. Well, nearly four decades later, need we excavate the tired details of the Stygian mess engendered by what has aptly come to be known as the "Trokosi Revolution"? Personally, I am amazed that many Ghanaians should be aghast at the fact that ISIS has been able, at the last count, to successfully recruit some ten Ghanaian youths into its ranks. I am simply flabbergasted that such recruitment had not happened earlier. As I vividly recall, as a capstone to cementing his political entrenchment in the seat of governance, then located in the old Danish slave castle comfortably perched on a coastal ledge of Osu township, in Accra, Messrs. Rawlings and Tsikata resorted to playing Ghanaian Muslims against their Christian brethren.

It was precisely during this period that the Anlo-Ewe duo introduced Islamic religious broadcasting on Fridays into the program of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), the national and then sole authorized broadcaster in the country. Chairman Rawlings would also angrily and haughtily claim that the country's dominant Christocentric citizenry was unethically discriminating against its minority Muslim counterpart, by the latter's flagrant denial of its right to have its members legally excused from the public workplace on their Holy Fridays in order to do the Dwuma or attend to their religious duties at their mosques, as well as attend to other sacred affairs and observances sanctioned by the Holy Quran by the former. To the best of my knowledge, though, the Rawlings junta made absolutely no logical arrangements for Muslim civil servants who absented themselves from work on Fridays to make up for lost time and the latter's attendant cost to the nation's economy. Indeed, I have written about this very sensitive matter previously and also wondered if any of the economic mavens of the so-called National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) has researched the economic cost of Chairman Rawlings' "social justice" policy decision in this sphere of our national endeavor.

Don't get me wrong; I am not saying that the very decision to extend a set-aside religious holiday, or the sabbath, for our Muslim brothers and sisters was a bad idea or policy decision. What I am hereby categorically saying is that had this policy initiative been other than populist oriented, Chairman Rawlings would also have ensured that its implementation would not become an unnecessary economic burden on the nation. I am not the least bit surprised that the active recruitment of Ghanaian Muslim youths into the jihadist ranks of ISIS is taking place right under the nostrils of the key operatives of the Bureau of National Investigations, a veritable state-sponsored terrorist machine, whose personnel, on the orders of the Mahama Flagstaff House, prefer to harass fierce political opponents of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) like Messrs. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako (aka Chairman Wontumi) and Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, than protect Ghanaian society and its largely responsible and law-abiding members from the sort of danger posed by the baneful likes of ISIS, Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda, among other notorious Islamist terrorist organizations.

Indeed, our entire National Security apparatus may be woefully out of whack with the exigencies of the times. Else, how would it have been possible for the National Democratic Congress operatives to have illegally, albeit successfully, tacked some 76,286 Togolese nationals onto Ghana's Voters' Register in the Ketu-South Constituency, in the Volta Region, alone? To be be brutally frank and honest with the dear reader, the allegedly successful recruitment of Mr. Nazir Alema into the ranks of ISIS is absolutely nothing to worry about. After all, as has been widely reported, the alleged ISIS recruit was a graduate of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) who, by most accounts, was gainfully employed. And the argument that Mr. Alema might have been motivated by economic frustration does not appear to muster scrutiny. It may, however, be valid in the nine, or so, other instances.

As an evidently successful college graduate, Mr. Alema was decidedly a mature adult, however youthful he might have been, who was quite capable of deciding for himself the kind of existential course he wanted to pursue. What the operatives of our National Security Agency/ Council (NSA/NSC) ought to focus most of its resources and personnel on, regards the studious tracking of the movements of these ISIS recruits in order to ensure that they never re-enter the country under any circumstances. And this is also where both Parliament and the Flagstaff House ought to promptly act in concert for the greater good and security of the country. This means, for instance, that the government may need to enact a special edict summarily condemning any proven ISIS veteran who attempts to re-enter the country, for whatever reasons, to death by firing squad. Absolutely no exceptions here, whatsoever, if law-abiding Ghanaian citizens are to live in peace and tranquility.

I also agree with the Daily Guide on the imperative need for Ghanaians to begin reassessing our globally acclaimed accolade of being faultingly hospitable for our own good (See "Security Alert" Modernghana.com 8/26/15). There is absolutely no other alternative, if we are to prevail as a nation worthy of such designation.

_____________________________________________________________