About a month ago, political pundits, party insiders and operatives, scholars, academicians, security experts, members of parliament, government officials, among others, swarmed the Ghanaian airwaves with all sorts of explanations and justifications for the US-Ghana military cooperation, Koku Anyidoho’s testimony about the professionalism of the Bureau of National Investigation (BNI) and the President of the Republic’s speech may have drawn the curtains on the partisan nature and hullabaloo of the treaty.
I am not a fun of partisan politics, but to cite ex-President John Mahama “Ghanaians have short memory” or what is categorized as “selective amnesia”. My former and retired Professor of African Politics, Dr. Mae King, of Howard University and former US President, George Walker Bush, will categorize the debate on the US-Ghana military cooperation as “believing the lies in the soul”. Is that a fair assessment of what really happened about a month ago? I leave the reader to be the judge as I proceed with my argument.
As I listened to the hullabaloo surrounding the debate and the president’s jaw-dropping anti-Americanism reference, I asked what is the justification for this “Enhanced Military Agreement”? The obvious answer is instability in the West African or Sahel sub-region.
Claire Metelitis, professorial lecturer in the School of International Service at American University in her recent book Security in Africa: A Critical Approach to Western Indicators of Threat, argues that based on an analysis of traditional security studies and Western security policy on Africa, insecurity in Africa are assessed through problematizing failed states, political instability, Muslim populations and poverty.
On political instability, which is the justification for the enhanced US-Ghana military cooperation on the insecurity of the West African and Sahel region, Claire Metelitis writes “Today, the need to address instability is couched in the narrative of the “war of terrorism” and the belief that democratic nations are not likely to harbor terrorists.
Western governments seek to resolve instability in Africa through technical means based on the perception that countries’ security challenges can be “fixed” by adopting the appropriate institutions and practices.
Increasingly, these two approaches to security are being viewed as alternatives to large scale conflicts to resolve instability.
Western governments enforce stability in two ways: they pressure African regimes to adopt democratic institutions in the hope that liberty within states will facilitate security between them, and they provide foreign military assistance. These operations help organize, train, equip, rebuild, and advise foreign militaries.
What has subsequently developed among Western analysts and government officials is a narrative that is focused on bolstering African military capabilities and establishing democratic institutions.
The securitization of instability in Africa through the over-aggregation of insecurity into a single crisis for example in the West African or Sahel region in countries like Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Gambia, Cote D’Ivoire, Nigeria etc., according to Metelitisd, decontextualizes the diverse and complex politics of the region, and fails to provide a platform for understanding the local articulations of security and instability, perpetuating the sense of crisis where one may not exist (Metelitis 2016:1-54).
These were the arguments that were missing in the US-Ghana military enhanced cooperation hullabaloo.
Now that the political footballing is over, the expertization of instability which Metelitis argues has in many ways resulted in a near paralyzing lack of specificity should take a backburner for security experts across the region to articulate a new paradigm of instability and insecurity that fits the African context.
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By: Benjamin Akwei, Ph.D.
Professor of International Relations & Comparative Politics (Africa & Middle East)