It is no longer an imagination or a conjecture that bandits discredited with many deaths in Burkina Faso have breached our shut borders and landed here. They are seeking a foothold in Ghana as part of their expansionist agenda.
Although we are not in a state of belligerency, our alertness status should be very high.
Our western neighbour, Ivory Coast has counted her losses already in terms of soldiers killed at the hands of the same marauding bandits from Burkina Faso with which she shares a frontier as we do.
It is some of these bandits who intelligence has it that they have infiltrated our dear country and are preparing to launch attacks in some parts of Bolgatanga and Tamale among other places.
That is a worrying intelligence which demands that our security agencies and their civilian counterparts share responsibilities in tackling.
We have never reached this level of insecurity occasioned by a geopolitical fact of sharing border to the north by a restive country battling bandits.
With porous borders and the ECOWAS protocols constituting real challenges to the effective management of our frontiers, there is an exigent need to educate Ghanaians to be very security-conscious during such dire times.
The fact of the matter is that we have found ourselves in these challenging times through no fault of ours. Even the Gulf of Guinea to which we belong alongside our ECOWAS neighbours is a troubled zone, with the location in the sight of piracy-hardened criminals.
Our compatriots on the peripheries of the country’s territory especially must be extra vigilant and to do so they must understand what is at stake.
The Police Administration’s wireless message to its commanders in the Northern and Upper regions is short of canvassing public support against the ‘invaders.’
We believe that being a national security issue of a gargantuan magnitude and involving foreigners who can come in disguised, the public must be brought into the picture.
Under normal circumstances the contents of the wireless message to the commanders being a restricted signal would not have come to the notice of the public.
We wonder therefore how the police and possibly the military can manage such a security situation without seeking the support of the public.
A few days after the police messages to the commanders to be on high alert, no effort has been made to get the public involved.
In every security situation as the world learnt from World War II and other wars, the public must be adequately informed about what is at stake so that they too can offer their needed support in support of the Motherland.
During the Second World War, the French public played crucial roles in favour of the homeland when the Nazis captured some parts of the country. Vichy as the headquarters of the regime set up after the German occupation of northern France depended on the wholehearted support of the French public.
We can only subdue the infiltrators or the bandits when we know who they are, their tactics, knowledge which should not be restricted only to the security agents.
Communities should alert the security agents upon sighting strangers with unusual traits especially along the border towns up North.
The subject should be opened widely and not restricted for tactical reasons to ensure a holistic response to the imminent security threat.
When our territorial integrity is threatened by foreign infiltrators from Burkina Faso, we must join hands and subdue the common enemy.