REJOINDER: Intelligence Is Not Simply What The Former Director-General BNI Says It Is

 The article, “The Difference Between Knowing and Seeing: Why Intelligence Services in Africa Are Still Fighting the Last War,” raises questions about the quality of intelligence analysis and the need for intelligence organizations to provide decision-makers with timely assessments of emerging threats. That objective is not controversial. What is problematic is the conceptual framework through which the former Director-General arrives at his conclusions and, more importantly, the sweeping judgements he makes about the professional competence and orientation of Ghana’s intelligence services.

The first problem is the failure to adequately distinguish intelligence from counterintelligence. Mark Lowenthal defines intelligence broadly as a process involving the identification of national security information requirements, collection, processing, analysis and dissemination, while counterintelligence safeguards those processes and information. His treatment of counterintelligence also demonstrates why it cannot be neatly confined to a single functional box. Counterintelligence involves collection, defensive and offensive activities and intersects with human intelligence, analysis, security and law enforcement.

This distinction matters enormously in the Ghanaian context. Under Ghana’s Security and Intelligence Agencies Acts, from 1996 through 2020 and now 2026, the Internal Intelligence Agency is expressly responsible not only for counterintelligence and internal security but also for intelligence relating to violent extremism and terrorism, organized crime and other criminal activity, as well as investigations conducted in collaboration with other security agencies into serious offences and matters of national importance. It is therefore intellectually unsound to present criminal investigation (which the author erroneously called criminal intelligence), security intelligence and counterintelligence as if they occupy three sealed compartments. Both strategic intelligence and counterintelligence are two sides of the same coin known as security intelligence.

It must be stressed that Ghana’s Security and Intelligence Agencies’ Act denotes the Research Department (RD) and the Bureau of National Intelligence (BNI) as the only intelligence agencies   of Ghana. The author’s reference to the Defence Intelligence (DI) and Police Intelligence (PI) as intelligence agencies is, therefore, flawed. The DI and PI are departments with specific mandates of providing intelligence to support the works of their respective agencies, just as the Ghana Immigration Service has also got an intelligence department supporting its work. This is a normal practice in advanced countries.

Counterintelligence is notoriously difficult to demarcate precisely because its functions overlap with intelligence collection, security protection, criminal investigations, counterterrorism and other national security activities. The academic literature recognizes this difficulty. Paul Redmond, writing in The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, describes counterintelligence in terms of identifying, deceiving, exploiting, disrupting and protecting against espionage and other intelligence activities. The literature on intelligence and law enforcement similarly recognizes that the two are distinct but substantially overlapping domains. This is why, for instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States of America (USA) would collaborate with or take over certain criminal investigations from other federal state law enforcement agencies when the need arises.

The second problem is the article’s characterization of the Bureau as essentially a “criminal intelligence” organization engaged in mere collection and recording of incidents and that has failed to become a genuine national security intelligence service.

That assertion requires considerably more evidence than the author provides. The Bureau’s work cannot reasonably be assessed from the visibility of its reports to an outsider. Much of counterintelligence and internal intelligence is deliberately invisible. Successful counterintelligence frequently produces no public event because its objective is to detect, neutralize, disrupt or prevent an adversary’s activity before it becomes visible. The absence of a visible outcome is not evidence of the absence of intelligence activity.

Additionally, there is sufficient evidence that the Bureau has lived up to its mandate as far as collecting, collating, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence to the policy-maker is concerned. If the policy-maker fails to act on the early-warning advice provided by the Bureau, that cannot be considered a deficiency of the intelligence service. From the 1966 and 1972 coup d’états through the 1993/4 and 2002 conflicts in the north to the Western Togoland Restoration Front’s attack of 2020, the Bureau always analyzed information on impending national security breaches and provided forward-looking insights, but the policy-maker failed to act on the judgement delivered. In the 1972 coup for instance, as Kofi Bentum Quantson related in his book “National Security: The Dilemma”, the Busia government dismissed the intelligence advice on the coup plot based on their naïve belief that an Akan cannot overthrow an Akan Prime Minister. In the 1993/4 Konkomba-Nanumba war and 2002 Dagbon crisis, the Bureau provided sufficient intelligence over a considerable time pointing to the imminent conflicts, yet the policy-maker sat on it until the conflicts broke out. Again, in the 2020 incident, intelligence advice was provided, the government of the day failed to act.

Another crucial point to note is the trend of different political traditions responding differently to intelligence insights provided by the Bureau. This is evident in the previous New Patriotic Party (NPP) government’s handling of the Western Togoland issue. Right after the 1956 plebiscite, the colonial administration as well as various post-independence governments have contained the group, acting on intelligence assessments of the Bureau, but the group invariably becomes uncontainable when the NPP, the author’s political tradition, is in power. This, clearly, is not failure on the part of the intelligence service.

The third problem concerns professional authority. The author writes as a former Director-General and therefore speaks with the authority of someone presumed to possess intimate knowledge of the organization. Yet his public assessment invites an obvious question: if the deficiencies he identifies were as fundamental and pervasive as he now suggests, what corrective measures did he initiate during his own 2-year tenure?

This question is particularly relevant because the author was not a career intelligence officer before becoming Director-General. His experience at the apex of an intelligence organization should not automatically be equated with the accumulated professional experience of officers who spent their careers collecting intelligence, conducting counterintelligence operations, managing sources, investigating security threats and working within the institutional doctrine of the Bureau.

There is also a professional irony in publicly criticizing the competence and intellectual quality of serving intelligence personnel after having been responsible for their leadership.

During his tenure, there were also concerns among officers about an apparent “they versus us” approach to professional relationships, reportedly reflected in the recurring question, “ɔka yɛ ho?”

— “is he or she one of us?” If such concerns are accurate, they raise a legitimate question about whether the very culture now being criticized was not, at least in part, reinforced by the leadership philosophy of the period.

An intelligence organization cannot develop professional analytical capacity by sidelining experienced officers in favour of individuals whose principal qualification is perceived political affinity or personal loyalty. If the former Director-General wishes to make the quality of Ghanaian intelligence personnel a subject of public debate, he must also be prepared to subject his own leadership decisions to the same scrutiny. If he chooses to surround himself with inexperienced officers who cannot produce useful intelligence products and he cannot also analyze the reports and produce forward-looking assessments from them, then the supposed empty reports he submits to the policy-maker rests squarely on him as the highest official of the organization. He cannot blame a system that has worked for his predecessors for ages and is still working for his successor who was his administrator. How then did or do they handle the system such that they could rely on it but he could not use the same system effectively during his tenure as the head? The article is therefore useful as a call for stronger intelligence analysis. It is much less convincing as a comprehensive diagnosis of the Bureau.

It must also be emphasized that what is most associated with his tenure was the drive for political power maximization. It is not new for the Bureau to make estimates of which party wins a constituency during an election year, but never has that been given prominence as witnessed under his watch. During that period, district officers were sidelined and officers perceived as loyalists were carefully selected with a huge budget above all other operations and prioritized to go round the country, with a Kobo collect App, just to assess the chances of the NPP. That was his priority, and that is what he is associated with in the minds of the Bureau’s operatives. If that was the demand of his political masters or consumer and is prioritized above galamsey operations that were destroying livelihoods and the environment for Ghanaians, how does this same person turn around to question the system that has produced volumes on galamsey activities, with some actors even daring to mention known party activists associated with the NPP?

One cannot say that the intelligence/national security architecture is perfect in Ghana. However, what the writer pointed out as the challenges confronting the BNI are far from reality. The realities he categorizes as the demand side to be written about later should have been the first, since it is based on demand that goods are supplied. To begin with, the colonial administration’s demand for political intelligence has never been reviewed and revoked, hence it remains in the Bureau’s collection list. Second, Ghana does not have what is known in the advanced countries as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework that seeks to prioritize threats according to the consumer’s preferences. Under such circumstances, the intelligence agencies are left with no choice but to continue collection from the last known collection demands even if they appear obsolete. Therefore, one cannot condemn the supplier when the consumer has not made their demands known. Third is the over politicization of the BNI, from the recruitment of new personnel to the appointment of commanders to the DG.

Intelligence is not simply the ability to predict the future. Nor is an intelligence report rendered inferior because it records an incident. Incident reporting can constitute the raw material from which strategic assessments, threat indicators, patterns and warnings are developed. Analysis without reliable collection is speculation. Collection without analysis is incomplete intelligence. Counterintelligence, meanwhile, cuts across both because it seeks to protect the intelligence enterprise while identifying, understanding and neutralizing hostile intelligence activity.

The proper debate, therefore, should not be whether the Bureau “files” or “thinks”. It should be whether its collection, counterintelligence, investigative, analytical and dissemination functions collectively satisfy Ghana’s national security requirements. That is a much more serious question, and it deserves an answer based on intelligence doctrine, professional experience and evidence rather than sweeping declarations about an institution that the author himself led.

Source: Oko Tetteh – Researcher and Intelligence Analyst

A Letter To The Military High Command

The fundamentals are broken! The basics are non-functional. 

The roots are shattered! The rudiments of scope of work are fractured and have become non-imperative! 

The elementals have been made to suit the whims and caprices of “few individuals.” To wit, if you sell your father’s land to buy a trumpet, where will you stand to blow it? The thin line we seem to be threading on…

1. Let the Big Man know we’re gradually growing an Army devoid of passion and servitude!

 

2. Let the Big Man know our training schools have become a dome where trainees determine how they want to be trained!

 

3. Let the Big Man know our recruitment process only churns out folks “looking for employment” while those ready and willing to serve are sidelined!

 

4. Let the Big Man know we’re increasing female participation in the workforce, yet the workload is still same because our “female ladies” have been arguably relegated to the various cookhouses, orderly rooms and Messes only. Emphasis on “arguably!”

 

 

5. Let the Big Man know physical fitness is now underrated in the service. A soldier who isn’t fit? I’m yet to see a Newscaster who also can’t speak good English. Caught the irony?

 

6. Let the Big Man know there are Soldiers who haven’t held rifles, least to talk of firing past 5yrs now. In case of emergencies? We are an Army, certainly not a security service!

 

 

7. Let the Big Man know conditions of work and terms of service are fast deteriorating. The reason for the upsurge in “Awol Cases.”

 

8. Let the Big Man know the future of the Armed Forces doesn’t look promising. We’ve not recruited, but employed a brigade of hungry looking “workers” only after the “15th Joy.”

 

 

9. Let the Big Man know our armouries are half filled with faulty weapons. Our artilleries can’t fire, our armours can’t move. Let the Big Man know the “Ceremonials” are too much!

 

10. Let the Big Man know a lot is happening that I can’t possibly pen down in this write up, because “I love my life…”

If the foundation of a building isn’t strong, great is its destruction!

To overcome some of these menaces, let’s first check how we enlist people, how they’re trained, how they finally join us and how they begin their early years of service…

#Ghana certainly deserves better!

Gracias

Galamsey To Worsen Without Right Intelligence Architecture

 There is a habit in Ghana's intelligence, security and governance establishment that nobody really calls out, because it feels too normal to be a problem: we log events. Something happens, we write it down, file it, and wait for the next thing. That's not intelligence. That's a diary with a security classification stamped on it. A diary doesn't warn you. It doesn't ask what this looks like in twenty-four months if nothing changes. It doesn't tell you which of the twenty things happening right now will still be happening, and worse, three or five years out. It just records. And while we've been recording, galamsey has gone from a manageable irritant to a full-blown national catastrophe, taking our water bodies, our forests, and our health system down with it.

Here's the part that should actually keep people up at night. Forget, for a moment, that selection onto task forces and postings to galamsey areas have quietly become the prize that well-connected people lobby for. None of this was inevitable. It's the direct, traceable cost of not having a forward-looking intelligence posture, and not having the political will to act on one. Every year we treated galamsey as an enforcement problem instead of an intelligence problem, our options got narrower. Prevention became containment. Containment is now sliding into "manage the damage." What used to be cheap to fix has become catastrophically, generationally expensive. A governance failure has curdled into an environmental emergency that will outlast most of the officials currently pretending it's under control.

So let's try something different. Let's actually run galamsey through the same machinery a serious state uses to think about any threat, not as an academic exercise, but as the template for how every major threat facing Ghana ought to be handled from here on.

First, we have to be honest about what we're actually fighting

Galamsey stopped being an environmental story, or a policing problem you solve by arresting "chanfan" users, a long time ago. What we're dealing with now is a full-scale organised crime enterprise, with an arms dimension, foreign financing, chieftaincy involvement, political protection, and money laundering happening at real scale. Call it anything smaller than that and you've already lost the plot.

And this is why the reclassification matters: you can't disrupt a network like this with incident reports. A raid here, an arrest there, an excavator pushed into a pit or torched on camera, none of it touches the structure underneath, because nobody has actually mapped that structure. These are sophisticated organisations, with financing layers, protection layers, and built-in ways to dodge enforcement. Treating them as a string of unconnected incidents is like arresting the drug courier driver and calling the cartel dismantled.

What is actually needed first is the analytical groundwork. Before any enforcement, we need to understand these networks as the organisations they are, and answer the questions that matter: who are the key players actually controlling this ecosystem? How exactly are the Minerals Commission and the Lands Ministry tied into it? Who sits where, how does the money move, where does it land? Which political and chieftaincy relationships are shielding which operations, and where do mercury and arms fit into the enforcement calculus? Only once that structure is actually on the table can you find the vulnerabilities worth striking, the choke points that collapse a network, instead of the visible edges that just get replaced within a week. Enforcement without that groundwork isn't disruption. It's theatre.

Step One: Name it in the National Security Strategy

We need an annual National Security Strategy from the Commander-in-Chief, and its whole job is to answer one blunt question: out of everything that could hurt this country, what deserves the state's attention and resources? Galamsey belongs in that document, not as an environmental footnote, but as its own issue of concern, a threat with a trajectory, actors, and the capacity to spill into other things: political financing, violent extremism, organised crime, corruption of local governance, armed clashes over territory, foreign-financed extraction networks operating with total impunity.

Naming it there isn't symbolic. It's what forces the rest of the system, budgets, mandates, political attention, to treat galamsey as a security threat instead of a seasonal news story that flares up whenever a river turns brown enough, or whenever a politician or a journalist bottles water from a site for the cameras.

Step Two: Translate it into the National Intelligence Strategy

Once galamsey is named as a national security concern, the National Intelligence Strategy has to answer the next question: what does the intelligence community actually need to know, and how well do we know it right now? This is usually where our galamsey "intelligence" quietly turns out to be recycled newspaper reporting and after-the-fact incident logs, not a properly analysed, connected picture.

A real NIS would force honest answers to hard questions. Who's actually financing these operations, and does that money originate here or offshore? Which foreign nationals and networks are involved, and how far do they reach into other illicit economies? Which local officials, chiefs, and security personnel are complicit, and is that opportunistic or structural? What's the real economic, environmental and public health trajectory if nothing changes, not guesswork, but actual modelled projections? None of that comes out of a diary. It only comes from an intelligence community explicitly tasked to build and maintain that picture continuously, whether or not galamsey happens to be in the news that week.

Step Three: The National Intelligence Collection Priority Framework

This is where strategy turns into something the collectors can actually use. A collection priority framework ranks what the state needs to know, so agencies aren't each independently deciding galamsey matters this month and something else matters next month. If galamsey sits where it belongs, as a tier-one priority threat with real likelihood and real impact, it gets sustained collection effort, not a task force stood up every time a video goes viral.

It also fixes a coordination failure that's quietly wasting half our capability: right now, several agencies are almost certainly collecting fragments of the same picture without knowing it, while whole dimensions of the threat go untouched. A priority framework doesn't just tell agencies what to chase, it tells them what not to duplicate.

Step Four: The Intelligence Collection Plan, where the agencies actually have to talk to each other. This is where strategy becomes a division of labour. A serious collection plan on galamsey would look something like this:

The Bureau of National Intelligence, as the domestic lead, owns the domestic side of the structure we described earlier. It builds the human picture: the chieftaincy connections, the political protection, the smuggling, facilitation and connivance links running alongside it. That means mapping which traditional authorities are leasing out or shielding concessions and why, which officials and security personnel are on the take, and how that protection runs upward, because it doesn't stop at the district level, and BNI is the only agency positioned to trace it that far.

The Research Department, as the external intelligence arm, picks up what BNI structurally can't. It owns the foreign financing dimension: where the money and the equipment come from outside Ghana, which foreign nationals and networks are running or bankrolling operations, and how those networks tie into the wider criminal architecture across West Africa. RD is also best placed to follow the laundering once it leaves the country.

The National Signals Bureau, as the signals agency, provides the technical backbone: communications and financial intelligence that maps the networks BNI and RD are building human pictures of, and either confirms or challenges what's coming in from the ground. It also owns the money laundering picture in its most concrete form, following transactions through shell arrangements, front businesses, and cross-border transfers. This is where the political-protection and foreign-financing threads get corroborated, or exposed as wrong.

Defence Intelligence brings the geospatial and operational-terrain picture, and owns the arms dimension: satellite and aerial monitoring of excavation sites and movement into forest reserves and mining concessions, and direct visibility on the weapons and armed protection built into these operations. This is the piece that can turn an enforcement raid from a policing exercise into a security operation with casualties on the table.

None of this works in isolation. The whole point of a collection plan is fusion, one picture built from four different vantage points, each doing the specific piece of structural work the threat actually demands, refreshed continuously instead of rebuilt from scratch every time a crisis grabs public attention again.

The point isn't galamsey. It's the muscle.

Galamsey is the illustration here, not the whole argument. The real point is that Ghana needs a forward-looking intelligence architecture, and galamsey is just the most visible, most expensive proof of what its absence costs us. If we had been running this process even twenty years ago, threat identified, strategy set, priorities ranked, collection plan executed and fused, we might still be in "prevention." Instead we're in "damage control," and every year we spend keeping a diary instead of forecasting pushes the bill higher.

The uncomfortable truth is none of this is exotic. It's standard practice in any intelligence community that takes itself seriously. We're not short on the concepts. We're short on the discipline to apply them before the crisis, instead of narrating it afterward.

The author, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, is an Intelligence and National Security Analyst, a former Director General of the Bureau of National Intelligence (2022–2025), and writes on national security and intelligence sector reform, risk, integrity assessment, and institutional governance in the Ghanaian context.

The Quiet Risk: Why Ghana Needs Evidence-Based Violence Prevention

Ghana is often regarded as a pillar of stability in West Africa. However, beneath this reputation lies a growing fragility. UNDP’s vulnerability assessment on the threats of violent extremism and radicalization in Ghana’s five northern regions underscores a clear reality: stability today does not guarantee immunity tomorrow. The findings underscore a critical truth: preventing violent extremism is not only a security necessity but also a developmental imperative.

This commentary critically re-examines the systemic weaknesses identified in the study, the evidence that must be acknowledged, and the strategies available for sustaining peace and resilience without succumbing to politicization or alarmism.

1. The Dual Reality of Ghana's Security Narrative

At the national level, Ghana's security narrative emphasizes external threats-such as cross-border infiltration from the Sahel, porous borders, and the spread of extremism. In contrast, local communities primarily focus on internal socio-economic pressures, exclusion, and unresolved conflicts, which they perceive as the true drivers of vulnerability. This discrepancy is significant. When national policies prioritize border security while local realities demand socio-economic support, the system risks addressing one issue while inadvertently exacerbating another.

2. Evidence of Deepening Structural Vulnerabilities

Youth Exclusion as a Persistent Warning Signal

The survey undertaken as part of the report highlights a troubling trend: 41% of respondents are youth, with 36% to 49% of youth in certain regions within northern Ghana facing unemployment, many of whom express a complete disconnection from state institutions. Disturbingly, 3-8% reported direct recruitment attempts into radical groups during their schooling years, a significant statistic in any national security context.

Education as the Strongest Predictor of Radicalization

Regression analysis based on the field data clearly indicates that:

Having no formal education is the most significant predictor of vulnerability to radicalization, surpassing social (social exclusion; weak trust in state institutions; identity conflicts) or economic (Youth unemployment; poverty; livelihood insecurity) factors. 

This insight is not merely a data point; it should fundamentally inform programming strategies.

Normalization of Insecurity

Across all five northern regions of Ghana, survey respondents describe their challenges-conflicts, marginalization, porous borders, and youth disillusionment-as "everyday realities." This normalization represents one of the report's most concerning findings. A society that normalizes insecurity becomes increasingly susceptible to extremist narratives.

3. Border Dynamics: A Development and Security Paradox

Despite heightened operations along the northern border, there are over 80 unofficial crossing points, vast unpatrolled areas, and smuggling routes that serve as essential lifelines for border communities. Communities report a trend of "foreign humanitarian actors" providing social services such as boreholes and religious facilities construction-efforts that foster goodwill but may conceal ulterior motives. Residents approach these interactions with caution, often characterizing them as "testing the waters." The takeaway is clear: border security must be intertwined with community trust and economic alternatives.

4. Shifting Social Incentives: From Constructive to Destructive

The transition from constructive incentives (education, livelihoods, community cohesion) to destructive ones (grievances, exclusion, conflict exploitation, misinformation) is gradual, driven by unemployment, political polarization, inter-religious tensions, and local conflicts. Once constructive incentives deteriorate, extremist narratives can swiftly fill the void.

5. A Critical Yet Constructive View: Addressing Systemic Struggles

Without assigning blame, the evidence points to systemic deficiencies that require candid recognition:

 (a) Fragmented early-warning and information pathways

Communities remain largely unaware of prominent national campaigns such as "See Something, Say Something," despite its visibility at the policy level.

(b) Insufficient state presence in high-risk areas

From education to border management, data consistently highlights gaps in state capacity-gaps that non-state actors can exploit.

(c) Youth "Camps" emerging as informal recruitment hubs

Often perceived as benign entertainment venues, these spaces are transforming into informal channels for mobilization and influence.

(d) Ongoing duplication of efforts

Communities frequently report "too many initiatives, too little change," indicating a pressing need for integrated programming rather than parallel efforts.

6. A Solutions-Oriented Path Forward

A critical examination of Ghana's response to violent extremism leads to one clear conclusion: Ghana requires a comprehensive, whole-of-society approach that aligns security vigilance with investments in human development.

 1. Youth Empowerment as a Frontline Defense

• Expand support for livelihoods, entrepreneurship, and social protection, particularly targeting out-of-school and unemployed youth.
• Combine economic inclusion with mentoring, coaching, leadership training, and psychosocial support systems.

2. Border Security Reform - Community First

• Integrate the Border Security (BOSEC) into the national security framework.
• Equip border posts with modern monitoring technology and enhance cross-border information sharing.
• Institutionalize community-led early warning systems and establish safe reporting channels at all levels and formalize their relationship with early response systems.

3. Deepen Social Cohesion Infrastructure

• Strengthen existing architecture of peace (National and Regional Peace Councils, religious councils, and customary institutions) as "peace engines."
• Promote intra and inter-faith and inter and inter-ethnic dialogue in communities identified as hotspots.

4. Counter Online Radicalization

• Establish public-private partnerships with digital platforms for content moderation, data sharing, and targeted women and youth-focused awareness initiatives.

5. Operationalize the National Framework for P/CVE - Beyond Paper

• Transform policy into tangible, funded, locally grounded interventions.
• Enhance the management of small arms and light weapons (SALW) stockpiles and disrupt illegal supply chains.

 The Vulnerability Assessment on the Threats of Violent Extremism and Radicalization in Northern Regions of Ghana report clearly warns that vulnerability in Ghana's northern corridors is escalating more rapidly than resilience is being developed. Communities, particularly the youth, are increasingly expressing their frustration and disillusionment. However, the report also highlights that Ghana still has a vital window of opportunity. A prevention agenda grounded in evidence, inclusivity, and local ownership can reverse this trend. Achieving this will require careful pacing, integration, and a willingness to confront systemic blind spots with humility and determination. Ghana must transform the insights from this study into actionable, sustained, community-driven change in order to maintain its stability as an asset in the sub-region.

Former BNI Boss Exposes How State Keeps Getting Surprised

There is a scene that plays out in the highest offices of the most powerful governments in the world every single morning. The President of the United States sits down, usually before 8am, and reads what is called the President’s Daily Brief. It is not a newspaper. It is not a summary of last night’s news neither is it a summary of incidents that happened the day before. It is a classified intelligence document, carefully written, carefully assessed, carefully delivered giving the most powerful person on earth insight on what is happening in the world that he does not yet know, what is developing that could affect America’s interests, and what his intelligence community thinks it means.

The CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the FBI’s intelligence arm, and a dozen other agencies have spent the preceding twenty-four hours collecting, analysing, and arguing about what goes into that document. Analysts have stress-tested their conclusions. Senior officers have pushed back on assessments they find too confident or not confident enough. The whole apparatus would have been working, through the night if necessary, so that when the President opens that briefing book, he is not guessing. He is reading the best available assessed judgment the state of America can produce about the world as it actually is.

Now ask yourself a simple question. How many African Presidents including Ghana’s get the benefit of serious intelligence analytic support towards decisions and governance?

Intelligence is Not James Bond or Jason Bourne

Before we go further, let us get something out of the way. When most people hear the word intelligence, they think of spies in dark clothing, intercepted phone calls, surveillance operations, and safe houses. That world exists. But it is not the world that makes the difference in governance. The thing that makes the difference, the thing that separates governments that make good decisions under pressure from governments that are perpetually surprised by events is analysis. Rigorous, disciplined, honest analytical work done by people with high mental agility, clinically selected, trained to think clearly about complex problems and write about them in plain language for decision-makers who do not have time for ambiguity.

Sherman Kent, the American historian who essentially invented modern intelligence analysis, said it decades ago: intelligence is knowledge. Not secrets. The business of collecting information, making sense of it, and delivering that sense to the people who need to act on it.

That is the business Ghana and many African states have never quite managed to take seriously.

What Intelligence Analysis Actually Looks Like When It Works

Let’s consider what happened in the lead-up to the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. The operation itself; the helicopters, the Navy SEALs, the compound in Abbottabad, is the part that gets dramatized in films. What does not get dramatized is the years of analytical work that preceded it. CIA analysts piecing together fragments of intelligence from multiple sources over multiple years. Building a picture, slowly and painstakingly, of a courier network. Assessing, with explicit acknowledgment of their uncertainty, that the compound in Abbottabad was probably bin Laden’s location. Presenting that assessment to President Obama with honest confidence levels, not certainty, because certainty was not available, but structured analytical judgment that gave the President enough to make a decision.

Obama made the call. The operation succeeded. But the decision that made the operation possible was not made in the Situation Room on the night of the raid. It was made, in analytical terms, over years of disciplined intelligence work that gave a President real option instead of guesses.

Again, consider a less dramatic but equally instructive example. When COVID-19 was still being called a novel pneumonia cluster in Wuhan in late 2019, intelligence services in the United States and elsewhere were already beginning to produce assessments about what it might become. Not because they had a crystal ball. Because they had analysts whose job was to watch for exactly that kind of emerging biological threat, to track the early signals before they became headlines, and to tell political leadership what was coming while there was still time to prepare. Some governments listened and got ahead of it. Others waited for the news cycle to tell them what their intelligence services were already trying to say. Did we wait for the news cycle in Ghana and rest of Africa?

What It Looks Like When It Does Not Work and What That Costs

Here is a question that should bother us in West Africa and every Ghanaian more than it does. When Boko Haram went from a fringe religious group in north eastern Nigeria to a force that controlled territory the size of Belgium, killed tens of thousands of people, and displaced more than two million, at what point did Nigeria’s political leadership receive an intelligence assessment saying this movement is becoming dangerous and here is what dangerous looks like in five years?

The answer, from everything the public record shows, is: not early enough. Not in a form that compelled action. Not delivered to political consumers who had been trained to read intelligence assessments and respond to them. Nigeria had security agencies. It did not have, in the functional sense, an intelligence service producing the kind of forward-looking analytical work that would have given its government real options before Boko Haram became a crisis that no one could ignore.

By the time it became impossible to ignore, the options had narrowed from prevention to containment. From cheap to catastrophically expensive. From a governance problem to a humanitarian disaster.

West African states including Ghana watched that happen across our eastern border. Did we draw any institutional lessons from it?

The Sahelian Threat and What We Are Not Seeing

Today, Burkina Faso is effectively partitioned. The Malian state controls less of Mali than it did ten years ago. Jihadist groups that started in the Saharan north have pushed through central Mali, through Burkina Faso, and are pressing into the coastal states. Northern Côte d’Ivoire has seen attacks. Northern Togo has seen attacks. Northern Benin has seen attacks.

The map of this expansion, if you draw it honestly, has a direction. And that direction does not stop at Ghana’s border out of respect for our stability or our democracy or our warm relationship with the herdsmen passing through our northern regions. It stops, or does not stop, based on the conditions it finds. The grievances available to exploit. The ungoverned spaces available to occupy. The recruitment networks available to activate.

A functioning intelligence community would be producing regular assessed judgments on exactly this question. Not newspaper summaries. Not randomly collected situation reports on incidents that have already occurred. Analytical assessments of where the expansion is heading, what indicators would tell us the calculus is changing, and what for instance Ghana’s specific vulnerabilities are, the open northern border, the youth unemployment, the ethnic and kinship networks that cross into Burkina Faso in both directions.

Is that work being done? Is it reaching the people who need it? Is it shaping decisions about where to deploy resources, what relationships to build, and what early warning architecture to construct? We may not have enough time on our hand.

The Argument Some People Make and Why It Does Not Hold

There is a view, heard often enough within policy circles in Accra and beyond in West Africa, that intelligence analysis is a luxury of wealthy states; that the CIA and MI6 and Mossad can afford elaborate analytical architectures because they have the budgets for them, and we should focus on the basics first. This argument has the causality exactly backwards.

Rwanda in 1994 did not have a functioning intelligence service capable of seeing what was coming. The result was one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century, a country destroyed in a hundred days, and a reconstruction cost in lives, in institutional capacity, in economic development foregone, that dwarfs any conceivable investment in analytical intelligence. Rwanda rebuilt. And one of the first things the post-genocide leadership did was invest seriously in intelligence capability, not because they had suddenly become wealthy, but because they had learned, in the most terrible possible way, what it costs not to see.

Singapore is not a large country. It does not have oil wealth or a vast defence budget. What it has is a government that decided, from independence, that a small country in a complex neighbourhood cannot afford not to know what is coming. Singapore built a horizon-scanning analytical architecture (RAHS) that is now studied by intelligence services around the world. It did not do this because it was rich. It became what it is, in part, because it did this.

Analytical intelligence is not a luxury of good governance. It is a precondition of it.

What the Difference Would Feel Like in Ghana

Imagine a Ghana in which the President, before making the decision to commit security resources to the northern border, receives an assessed intelligence brief telling him what the Intelligence community’s analytical units have determined about the current state of extremist network activity in the three northern regions; where recruitment is happening, which communities are most vulnerable, what indicators of escalation the community is currently tracking, and what the assessment of risk over the next twelve months is.

Imagine a Ghana in which the decision about how to respond to the annual flooding of Accra is informed by an intelligence picture not of flooding locations and effects but of the corruption network behind illegal building approvals, the officials, the developers, the financial flows, the political connections so that enforcement is targeted, evidence-based, and resistant to the selective pressure that has historically spared the well-connected.

Imagine a Ghana in which a future pandemic is not first understood through CNN but through an early analytical warning produced by an intelligence analytical community that has been watching the biological threat environment the way the CIA watches geopolitical risk.

None of that requires a CIA budget. It requires analytical seriousness, the decision that this kind of knowledge matters, that the people who produce it deserve to be selected carefully beyond partisanship, trained properly, and listened to honestly, and that the political consumer at the top of the system is going to read what they produce and take it seriously.

That decision has not yet been made in Ghana and many African states in the sustained, structural way that would produce results.

The Question Worth Sitting With

The United States does not start its President’s morning with a classified intelligence brief because it is a superpower. It became and remains a superpower, in part, because it decided early that governing well requires knowing what you are governing in and invested, consistently and seriously, in building the institutional machinery to provide that knowledge.

Ghana governs one of West Africa’s most stable and democratic countries. It sits in one of the continent’s most complex and rapidly changing security environments. It faces threats that are not hypothetical; they are documented, directional, and approaching. The question is not whether Ghana can afford to think seriously about intelligence analysis. The question is whether Ghana can afford not to.

What if someone had told the President before it happened? That is the question an intelligence service exists to make unnecessary.

The author, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe is an Intelligence and National Security Analyst, a former Director General of the Bureau of National Intelligence (2022-2025) and writes on national security and intelligence reforms, risk, integrity assessment and institutional governance in the Ghanaian context.