Gargantuan Appointments And Promotions In The Ghana Armed Forces

The Supreme Commander has been embarking on gargantuan kokofu appointments and promotions in all the Security Services and the Ghana Armed Forces in particular in an unprecedented manner. The appointments and promotions of 2025, post 7th January and 2026 are based purely on political and ethnocentric considerations.

Juniors have been promoted over seniors not because of merit, abilities, skills, knowledge and experiences but based on politics and ethnicity. Most of the people who have been and/or are being promoted have their political godparents, NDC Party Cards and affiliations, evidence of financial and operational assistance to the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the 2016 and 2024 elections.

The principle of “NO CONTRIBUTION NO CHOP (NCNC)” has been and is being strictly applied. In order to put our research findings in their rightful perspectives, we started publishing the seniority roll of the Ghana Armed Forces, as at 7th January 2025 when the Supreme Commander was sworn into office as President by the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Her Ladyship Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Torkornoo.

We started with the highest rank (General) downwards through Lieutenant General, Major General and their equivalents and got to Brigadier Generals and equivalents in the Ghana Navy and Ghana Air Force.

We ended the last publication with Brigadier General Charles Kwashie Gbekle (GH/2903) as the 74th Brigadier General in terms of seniority in the Ghana Armed Forces as at 7th January 2025.

We wish to continue the list of Brigadier Generals and equivalents as follows:

75. Brigadier General Lloyd Kwaku Atror (GH/2639) – Deputy Commandant, Ghana Military Academy.
76. Brigadier General Yehuza Salifu (GH/2685) – Deputy Chief Staff Officer (P&P), Army Headquarters.
77. Brigadier General Zibrim Bawa Ayorrogo (GH/2646) – Commissioner of Customs, GRA, Attached to Army Headquarters
78. Brigadier General Richard Lassey Mensah (GH/2941) – Commander, Kumasi Military Hospital.
79. Brigadier General Thomas Acquinas Gbireh (GH/3007) – Head of Department, Surgical Department, 37 Mil Hospital.
80. Brigadier General Richard Naab (GH/3009) – Head of Department, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 37 Mil Hospital.
81. Commodore Seth Adjei Adjetey (GH/3037) – Head of Department, Surgeon Department, 37 Mil Hospital.
82. Commodore Paul Kudzo Yegbe (GH/3042) – Head of Department, Quality Assurance Department, 37 Military Hospital.
83. Brigadier General Forster Ohene Okae-Yeboah (GH/2696) – Senior Directing Staff, National College of Defence Studies.

​84. Brigadier General Timothy Tifucro Ba-Taa-Banah (GH/2699) – Attached to National Security.

​85. Brigadier General Frank Worlanyo Kwasi Agbebo (GH/2700) – Director General Policy (GHQ, COS).

​86. Brigadier General Eric Kwame Boa-Amponsem (GH/2711) – Senior Directing Staff, National College of Defence Studies.

​87. Brigadier General Isaac Amponsah (GH/2777) – ADC to President Akufo-Addo, Jubilee House.

​88. Brigadier General Glover Ashong Annan (GH/2700) – Assistant Commandant (R&D), HQ Training Doctrine.

​89. Brigadier General Albert Yaw Assiamah (GH/2561) – Director General, Human Resource, GHQ (PA).

​90. Brigadier General Albert Sison Ogaja (GH/2694) – Chief Coordinator, National College of Defence Studies.

​91. Brigadier General Maxwell Obuobi Mantey (GH/2721) – Deputy Commander, HQ, Support Services Command.

​92. Brigadier General Richard Agbeko Kinney (GH/2704) – Commander, 14 Engineer Brigade, Burma Camp.

​93. Brigadier General Jude Barry Mwinyel (GH/2784) – Deputy Chief Staff Officer (Logistics), Army Headquarters.

​94. Brigadier General Emmanuel Opare Nyante (GH/2785) – Deputy Chief Staff Officer (Administration), Army Headquarters.

​95. Air Commodore Richard Danso (GH/2854) – Commander, Air Force Logistics, Accra.

96. Air Commodore Samuel Tettey Tetteh-Charway (GH/3142) – Deputy Chief Staff Officer (Air Intelligence), Air Force Headquarters.
97. Air Commodore Sophia Adzo Jiagge (GH/2863) – Deputy Chief Staff Officer (Administration), Air Force Headquarters.
98. Commodore Stephen Billins Nyam (GH/2872) – Deputy Chief Staff Officer (Operations and Training), Naval Headquarters.
99. Commodore James Adongo Agambire (GH/2873) – FOC, Headquarters, RIVCOM.
100. Air Commodore Kwabena Kissiedu Mansukure Atiemo (GH/2962) – Base Commander, Air Force Base, Takoradi.
101. Brigadier General Andrews Seth Altoh (GH/2778) – Head of Postgraduate College, 37 Military Hospital.
102. Brigadier General Christopher Yaw Dagadu (GH/2686) – National Defence University.
103. Brigadier General Charles Kweku Budu-Kumi (GH/2703) – Director General, GHQ (Civilian Establishment).
104. Brigadier General Theophilus Adokwei Myers (GH/2763) – Head Medical, 37 Military Hospital.
105. Brigadier General William Adarkwa Kwabiah (GH/2753) – Senior Directing Staff, National College of Defence Studies.
106. Brigadier General Selorm Kwasi Amengor (GH/55) – Commander 10 Artillery Brigade Akoefe.
107. Brigadier General Michael Antiaye Addy (GH/2783) – Director General, Support Services, GHQ (MLD).
108. Brigadier General Salifu Osumanu (GH/2808) – Defence Financial Controller, GHQ (DFC).
109. Commodore Bismarck Kobla Akabutu (GH/2857) – Deputy Defence Adviser, London, United Kingdom.
110. Commodore Raymond Kyaano (GH/2958) – Senior Directing Staff, National College of Defence Studies.
111. Commodore Roger Bagoniah (GH/2960) – Deputy Chief Staff Officer (Logistics), Naval Headquarters.
112. Brigadier General Benjamin Godson Kumi Woode (GH/3215) – Director General, General Headquarters (Religious Affairs).

Thus, as at 7th January 2025, the summary of “Generals” in the Ghana Armed Forces was as follows:

* Four Star General – 1

* Three Star Generals and equivalent – 4

* Two Star Generals and equivalent – 15

* One Star Generals and equivalent – 112

Total: 132

As at the same 7th January 2025, the following commissioned officers held the rank of Colonel and equivalent in the Ghana Armed Forces:

1. Colonel Charles Kweku Ayiku (GH/2693) – Deputy Director General, Defence Industries Department, GHQ.
2. Colonel John Ishmael Yao Boglo (GH/2701) – Deputy Director General, Logistics [GHQ (Log)].
3. Colonel Edward Awaribey (GH/2712) – Deputy Director General, General Headquarters, Joint Operations.
4. Colonel Francis Sasu (GH/2695) – Acting Chief Coordinator, National Defence University.
5. Colonel Clement Titus Nii Mensah Laryea (GH/3073) – Physician, 37 Military Hospital.
6. Colonel Percy Sydney Tetteh Annan (GH/3074) – Acting Commander, Level II Plus Field Hospital, Tamale.
7. Colonel Nicodemus Larbi Simpong (GH/3075) – Commanding Officer, UNISFA, Ghana Medical Corps 3.
8. Colonel Monte Kwaku Nuamah Kutin (GH/3076) – Officer In Charge Anesthesia, 37 Mil Hospital.
9. Colonel Joy Frederick Nyankomabo Anaman (GH/3078) – Director Dental, GHQ (Medical).
10. Colonel Joshua Amanor (GH/2760) – Deputy Commander, HQ Army Training Command.
11. Col Bessa Kwao-Adotey (GH/2752) – Deputy Director General, GHQ (International Peace Support Operations).
12. Col Wellington Kwame Attipoe-Dumashie (GH/2754) – General Coordinator, HQ Army Training Command.
13. Col William Nii Nortey (GH/2758) – Chief of Staff, UNDOF.
14. Col Alfred Kojo Botsoe (GH/2762) – Director Training, Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre.
15. Col Abednego Eclaircie Shooter (GH/2823) – Deputy Military Secretary, GHQ (Military Secretary).
16. Col Ebenezer Mark Alo (GH/2824) – Seconded to Rwandan Armed Forces Command and Staff College as Directing Staff.
17. Col Richard Kainyi Mensah (GH/2825) – Assistant Chief of Staff (Operations and Training), GHQ COS.
18. Col Goodwill Yao De-Souza (GH/2826) – X-List; Course Local, National College of Defence Studies.
19. Col Kweku Yankson (GH/2827) – Deputy Military Adviser, UN Headquarters, New York.
20. Col Kingsley Kwabena Kessie Affrifah (GH/2829) – Chief G7, Army Headquarters.
21. Col George Abosi Oppong (GH/2832) – R List – Staff Officer, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
22. Col William Kwaku Abotsi (GH/2746) – Director, Corporate Affairs, GHQ (Defence Industries Department).
23. Col Kwesi Ayima (GH/2748) – Chief Coordinator, Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College.
24. Col Michael Kwami (GH/2757) – Director, Research and Development (GHQ DID).
25. Col Samuel Stanley Nanor Mezo (GH/2761) – Deputy Director General, GHQ (Training).
26. Col Fuseini Abdulai Nabogma (GH/2828) – Director Supply and Transport, GHQ (S&T).
27. Col Richard Kofi Akotoh (GH/2790) – Director Physical Training and Sports, GHQ (Training).
28. Col Frederick Aboagye (GH/3143) – Deputy Judge Advocate General, Ministry of Defence (Chief Director]).
29. Col Halidu Ayinga Salifu (GH/3145) – Officer In Charge Dental, 37 Mil Hospital.
30. Col Joseph Kelvin Merdiemah (GH/2808) – Deputy Director General, GHQ (Plans, Research and Development).
31. Col John Danso-Ankrah (GH/2803) – Deputy Director General HR, GHQ (Personnel Administration).
32. Col Jonas Agyei Wiafe (GH/2805) – Director of Engineer Services, GHQ (DES).
33. Col Henry Kwesi Nditsi (GH/2807) – Director of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, GHQ (DEME).
34. Col Joseph Kobla Buame (GH/2809) – Director Resettlement, GHQ (Resettlement).
35. Col Ibrahim Abukari Salifu-Wumbei (GH/2810) – X-List, Course Local, National College of Defence Studies.
36. Col Stephen Opoku Agyeman (GH/2811) – X-List, Course Overseas, UK.
37. Col Clement King Dingane (GH/2814) – Acting Chief Coordinator, HQ Support Services Command.
38. Col Edward Owusu-Ansah (GH/2705) – Chief Coordinator, HQ Training Doctrine.
39. Naval Captain Edward Owusu Nyarko (GH/3099) – Leave without Pay and Allowances wef 15 Mar 2024 to 14 March 2025.
40. Col Simon Doe Kwablah Gbezeh (GH/2830) – Director of Ordnance Service, GHQ (Ordnance).
41. Col Lawrence Deku (GH/2812) – X-List, Course Local, Ghana School of Law.
42. Col Lawrence Brobbey Owusu (GH/2817) – Chief G3 (Peace Support Operations), Army HQ.
43. Col Emmanuel Larbi Sarpong Gyadu (GH/2813) – Chief G3 (Operations), Army Headquarters.
44. Col Godson Edekor (GH/3010) – Obs and Gynae, 37 Military Hospital.
45. Col Michael Mawuena Edem Yao Adzo (GH/2815) – Director Outreach and Best Practices, GHQ (Inspector General’s Department).
46. Col Robert Narh (GH/2914) – Commander, Army Combat Training School.
47. Col Bernard Baba Pantoah (GH/2915) – Military Assistant to Chief of Defence Staff.
48. Col George Noble Kwaku Hoenyedzi (GH/2804) – R List – African Union Transition Team in Somalia (ATMIS).
49. Col Eric Annor (GH/2714) – Acting Director Projects and Statistics, GHQ (Defence Industries Department).
50. Col Mohammed Wumbei (GH/2916) – Chief Logistics Officer, HQ Army Training Command.
51. Col Issahaku Beyolteim Mohammed (GH/2917) – X-List Course Local, National College of Defence Studies.
52. Col Ekow Nkrane Mensah-Yawson (GH/2822) – Deputy Commander/Chief of Staff, HQ 15 Armoured Brigade.
53. Col Frank Cofie Adzasu (GH/2835) – Director Logistics Support, GHQ (IPSO).
54. Col Jonathan Kofi Kumado (GH/2837) – Deputy Director Combat Intelligence, GHQ (Defence Intelligence).
55. Col Andrews Oduah (GH/2839) – Deputy Director General, GHQ (Department of Communication and Information Systems).
56. Col Henry Kwaku Badasu (GH/2840) – Army HQ Attached to Ghana Boundary Commission as Director Strategic Operations.
57. Col Gaspard Dan Kwaning Asare (GH/2843) – Commander, 851 Explosive Ordnance Devices Regiment.
58. Col Noble Carl Doe Dei-Alorse (GH/2869) – Chief Coordinator, Ghana Military Academy.
59. Col Mohammed-Mukhtar Ibn-Abubakar (GH/2862) – Officer In Charge, Physiotherapy Department, 37 Military Hospital.
60. Naval Captain John Bekuin-Wurapa (GH/2908) – X-List, Course Overseas, Nigeria.
61. Naval Captain Ramsey Bamba (GH/2910) – Acting Deputy Chief Staff Officer (Logistics), Additional as Director Supply Division, Naval Headquarters.
62. Group Captain Ishmael Tettey Djagmah (GH/2947) – Assistant Chief of Staff (Logistics), General Headquarters (Chief of Staff).

The Enemy Within — Ex-BNI Boss Hints

 Try asking someone to picture Ghana's organized crime problem and you will get the same scene almost every time: a trafficker at a border, a truck with a false floor, somebody operating in the shadows while the state chases from behind. It is a comfortable picture, mostly because it keeps the state clean, always the one catching, hardly the one being caught.

The numbers tell a different story.

In 2025, the ENACT Organized Crime Index scored Ghana's criminal actor categories, and the top spot didn't go to foreign cartels, or the mafia-style gangs that dominate popular imagination, or the loosely networked local syndicates people picture when they hear “organized crime.” It went to state-embedded actors, officials inside the police, immigration, customs, excise, and preventive services, found facilitating drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and illegal mining from their own desks. This is similar to Afrobarometer’s data that has consistently identified some of these state institutions widely perceived as corrupt.  Mafia-style groups scored lowest of all categories on the same list. Ghana's biggest organised crime problem isn't outsiders breaking in. It's what happens once they are already through the door.

Proof arrived faster than expected

The findings didn't stay theoretical for long. On 17th September 2026, following the seizure of 3.9 tonnes of cocaine linked to Ghana at the French port of Dunkirk, President Mahama called an emergency security meeting at Jubilee House. Security chiefs told him ten people were already in custody over the case. Four were serving officers of the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority, one of the most sought after agencies for jobs!

Those four weren't outsiders who slipped past the port's defences. On the allegations as reported, they were the defences, the barrier meant to stop the shipment, allegedly repurposed into the reason it got through. It's the ENACT finding compressed into a single case file: state-embedded actors, not external intruders, sitting at the centre of the largest cocaine seizure Ghana has been linked to on record. Whoever signed off on posting those four officers where they were, and how, deserves as much scrutiny as the shipment itself. Install every scanner in the world. Without a clean recruitment and enforcement pipeline for integrity inside security, the exposure stays exactly where it was.

What the surveillance claim leaves out

Days after the arrests, NACOC added a claim worth reading closely against this article's actual argument, not because it resolves the story, but because of what it quietly leaves uncovered. On 19th September, a NACOC spokesperson told TV3 that the three suspects it had arrested were people the Commission had under surveillance for “between a year and two,” and that investigators deliberately waited for the right moment to strike so that every connected suspect could be taken in one operation.

Notice precisely who that claim covers. NACOC's three suspects are alleged representatives of Jos Leijdekkers, the Dutch fugitive known as “Bolle Jos” external-facing facilitators of an outside network. The surveillance claim is about them. It says nothing about the four Customs officers named three days later at the Jubilee House meeting. Those two groups may turn out to be the same case, or two separate threads that happened to surface in the same fortnight; nobody has said which. If NACOC's two-year effort was built around watching an outside fugitive's local contacts, it tells us little about whether anyone was watching the officers inside Customs at all which, on the ENACT finding this piece opened with, is precisely the higher-risk category.

So a few questions worth asking plainly; Were the four Customs officers part of the same surveillance operation NACOC describes, or identified through an entirely separate process and if separate, was that process proactive, or purely reactive to the Dunkirk seizure? If surveillance genuinely ran for up to two years without the shipment itself being stopped, does that reflect deliberate case-building, or a real gap between watching a network and having the reach to stop it moving product through Ghana's ports? And is there a standing mechanism inside Customs, Immigration, or the ports themselves, independent of NACOC's external-facing surveillance, tasked with the kind of internal vetting and anomaly detection this article argues is missing? Alternatively, did these four officers surface only because an external, reactive investigation happened to reach them?

No clean answers yet, and that's rather the point. A claim of long-running surveillance, aired on television five days after the fact, isn't the same thing as a standing record anyone can check. Enforcement reacts to a completed offence; intelligence is built to catch the anomaly before it or apart from it entirely. A two-year surveillance operation aimed at an outside fugitive's local contacts, however well executed, is still enforcement logic pointed outward. It isn't evidence that Ghana has built the inward-facing capability this piece argues is missing. Until that distinction gets answered plainly, four arrested Customs officers confirm the state-embedded-actor problem. They don't prove the system built to catch it already exists.

Why arrests alone don't fix this

This is the trouble with treating this as purely a law-and-order matter. Enforcement works by drawing a line; the state on one side, the criminal on the other and moving people across it through arrest and prosecution. Against outside threats, that line does its job. Against a threat sitting inside the enforcement machinery itself, the line stops meaning much of anything.

An officer waving cocaine through a port isn't going to be caught by the port's own procedures, because he is the procedure. A customs official clearing smuggled excisable goods isn't going to trip an alarm he controls. This isn't hypothetical, it maps directly onto corruption already documented across procurement, parts of the judiciary, the police service, and land, tax, and customs administration, with billions of dollars in yearly losses attached to it. When some share of the people meant to catch the crime are also the people committing it, adding more enforcement doesn't close the gap. It just puts the fox on a longer patrol shift!

Anyone who has spent real time around Ghana's security and revenue agencies knows a quieter version of this story, and they know the vocabulary for it too. Officers talk openly about “juicy” postings versus “dry” ones, and everyone in the room knows which is which. Airports, passport processing offices, seaports, the Elubo and Aflao land borders, mining communities, and even the anti-galamsey task forces meant to police them sit firmly on the juicy side of that ledger. These aren't postings people easily get assigned to. They're postings people angle for. In a normal institution, remote or demanding postings are the ones nobody fights over; here, the opposite happens, and competition for these slots runs through informal networks and patronage rather than merit or rotation policy. That reversal is itself the tell. Something about those postings is worth more to the officer than the salary attached to them, and that something has to be coming from somewhere. A state serious about facilitation and connivance would treat unusual demand for a posting, the scramble for “juicy” over “dry” as a red flag in its own right, rather than waiting for the trafficking case downstream to explain it.

What only intelligence catches

Enforcement and intelligence solve different problems, and the difference is not academic. Enforcement reacts to a completed or ongoing offence. Intelligence looks for the pattern before it, or entirely apart from it: assets that have grown faster than a declared salary should allow, officials who keep turning up in the company of known facilitators, cases that mysteriously stall or lose evidence around the same desks, money that keeps routing through the same nodes no matter which case file it's attached to, or, as above, an unusual appetite for one posting over another.

You don't need a whistleblower or a foreign indictment to catch any of this. You need a standing analytic capability, walled off from the chain of command it may have to investigate, with a mandate to look inward as seriously as it looks outward. Real vetting. Financial disclosure systems that actually verify what is disclosed. Internal counter-intelligence inside security and revenue agencies. None of this is exotic. Any state that takes seriously the idea that its own institutions are a target, and not just a tool, already has these in place.

Who benefits from staying blind

The obstacles here are not technical, and pretending otherwise wastes time. An agency, or a political leadership, drawing benefit directly or through patronage from illicit gold, drug transit, or customs leakage has little real incentive to build the capability that would expose it. That is why the baseline problem raised in the first article of this series and the state-embedded actor problem raised here aren't two separate stories. They're one story told from two angles: a state that has not built the capacity to see organised crime clearly is, unsurprisingly, a state where some of the people that clearer sight would expose have good reason to keep it dim.

No single reform breaks that cycle. It takes sustained political will to fund and protect internal-integrity intelligence work even when, especially when what it turns up implicates people close to authority. Ghana already has the analytic talent for this. What has been missing is the institutional will to let that talent look wherever the evidence leads, including inward.

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

REJOINDER: Galamsey Does Not Need A New Intelligence Architecture

Nana Attobrah Quaicoe, a former Director-General of the Bureau of National Intelligence, is not wrong about one thing: galamsey has become a serious national problem whose effects are becoming graver by the day. His assertion that criminal networks behind illegal mining (where they exist) should not be dealt with by only arresting low-level operators while financiers, facilitators and enablers are left is also right.

Nevertheless, his recent intervention again appears as an attempt to convert a problem of governance and enforcement into a problem of intelligence architecture. The plain, elementary question in this circumstance is: what exactly is the intelligence community expected to foretell about galamsey that is new or that the State does not already know?

Galamsey does not constitute an emerging threat that is yet to be found by intelligence analysts. It is already an illegal activity. The Minerals and Mining Act of Ghana establishes the legal framework that regulates mining, and subsequent amendments have continued to strengthen sanctions for illegal mining and related offences.

Therefore, what the State needs is not intelligence to tell it that a person who operates mining equipment without legal authorization, encroaching a prohibited area and is destroying a river body, is involved in an illegal activity. In many cases, these activities are done in the open, in broad daylight, in known communities, using excavators, washing plants, pits and other visible infrastructure. This is where the thesis about “forward-looking intelligence” becomes unnecessarily theoretical.

Assuredly, intelligence is useful in identifying the financiers of illegal mining, the equipment supply networks, depraved officials who protect the criminals, the flow of illicit funds and other organized criminal scopes. That intelligence is certainly useful, but its function is to aid enforcement, not to supersede or replace enforcement.

Indeed, the author's own proposal implicitly concedes this point. He calls for intelligence to identify the actors, financing structures, political and chieftaincy relationships, and other networks behind galamsey before enforcement is undertaken. But how much more intelligence is required before the State acts against an illegal mining operation that is already known, visible and operating in defiance of the law? The very “incident diary” that the author denigrates is replete with useful information on the actors involved in the menace, from the Professor Frempong Boateng Report prior to the 2020 General Elections in which the infamous “party hea sika” ­­– “party needs money” was recorded to the lead-up to the 2024 elections in which constituency executives of political parties were explicitly mentioned as enablers of galamsey activities in order to finance their party. Even the recent trial and incarceration of the former Ashanti Regional Chairman of the author’s own NPP for his involvement in galamsey is a clear case in point.

It is gravely dangerous to make intelligence the explanation for every dereliction of the State. Somewhere along the line, the problem is no longer that the State is oblivious. The problem is that the State is well-informed but lacks the courage for decisive, consistent, dispassionate action.

If a galamseyer is engaged in illegal mining in the open, the critically useful questions are not necessarily “What will this look like in twenty-four months?” or “What is the trajectory of this threat?” The timely questions are: Who has the authority to halt it? Why has it not been stopped? Who is protecting it? Why has the protection not been investigated? Why are offenders not being prosecuted? And why do operations resume after enforcement teams leave? Those are questions of political will, institutional discipline, enforcement capacity and accountability.

Furthermore, it is essential to draw the distinction between legitimate intelligence requirements and intelligence becoming an apology for delayed action. If intelligence reveals that a certain individual is a financier of dozens of illegal mining operations, that information can make enforcement more effective. But it ought not to become necessary to generate a suave national intelligence assessment before the State takes decisive action against the illegal mining operation itself. Nor should the enforcement of Ghana's mining laws be depicted as something that would necessarily discourage foreign investment. Serious foreign investors are not discouraged because a state enforces its laws. They are more likely to be concerned about a state in which the application of laws is circumfused in selectivity, illegal operators are insolent, environmental standards are treated with reckless abandon and legitimate businesses are left to contend with enterprises operating illegally. A predictable rule-of-law environment is an investment advantage; selective enforcement is not.

The latest article further shows an intricate division of intelligence responsibilities among the Bureau of National Intelligence, Research Department, National Signals Bureau and Defence Intelligence. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with inter-agency coordination. Nonetheless, the question is whether such sophisticated framework is actually the missing ingredient in the fight against galamsey.

The State cannot delay action while a four-agency intelligence fusion mechanism is invoked to establish what may happen in three or five years to a river that is being destroyed today. The river needs protection today. In the same way, if an excavator is operating illegally today, it needs to be halted today, or if a financier is identified today, the correct investigative and prosecutorial processes should kickstart today, or if a public official, traditional authority, security officer or other person is confirmed to be aiding galamsey, the law should promptly apply to that person.

Clearly, that is not an argument against intelligence. It is an argument against over-intellectualizing a problem whose most basic inadequacy is the failure to translate knowledge and law into decisive action.

There is another uncomfortable question that the former Director-General's interventions have not sufficiently addressed. If the country's intelligence architecture has been so fundamentally incapable of providing forward-looking assessments, as he repeatedly suggests, then what institutional reforms were initiated during his own tenure to correct this alleged deficiency? What collection priorities were established? What analytical systems were introduced? What threat assessments were produced? What warnings were issued? And what recommendations were made to decision-makers concerning galamsey?

Criticism of an institution after leaving office is legitimate. But former institutional leaders should also be prepared to account for what they did with the institutional authority, information and resources available to them while they occupied the very positions from which they now diagnose systemic failure.

Most certainly, the fight against galamsey requires intelligence. It requires investigation. It requires financial tracing. It requires intelligence-led targeting of financiers and facilitators. It requires inter-agency cooperation. But above all, it requires the State to enforce its own laws, and do so intentionally, decisively, consistently and fearlessly.

Galamsey has continued not because Ghana lacks the intellectual capacity to conceive what it might become. It has continued because, over many years, illegal mining has been allowed to continue despite the State knowing what is happening.

The country therefore needs less theorizing about what galamsey might become and more determination to deal with what it already is.

An illegal activity does not become less illegal because its perpetrators are organized. And the State does not need a new intelligence architecture to know that a crime being committed openly must be stopped.

Source: Oko Tetteh – Researcher and Intelligence Analyst

Email: otetteh339@gmail.com

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.