Albert Kan-Dapaah
The Minister-designate for National Security, Albert Kan-Dapaah, has described as ‘strange’ the invasion of armed military personnel into the Chamber of Parliament to break up a scuffle between rival lawmakers on the eve of January 7, hours before President Akufo-Addo was sworn into office to continue a second term.
The soldiers had entered the Chamber after Members of Parliament (MPs) from both the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) pushed and shoved each other as the event was being telecast live.
The MPs were selecting a Speaker for the Eight Parliament of the Fourth Republic after the December 7, 2020 general election.
Answering questions from members of the Appointments Committee during a public vetting yesterday, Mr. Kan-Dapaah said he got alarmed when he first saw the soldiers entering the parliamentary chamber.
“I couldn’t agree more with you (referring to a questioner, James Agalga, NDC MP for Builsa North). This is obviously a strange thing, when you have soldiers going into a parliamentary chamber for whatever reason,” he stressed, and added that “my colleagues were equally alarmed, and so were members of the government also alarmed that something like that had happened.”
“I did take the trouble to find out how it happened. It was that simple. A commander, in his opinion, thought that things were getting out of hand in the chamber and that they needed to go there to try to restore order,” he revealed.
The minister-designate said he then posed the question “to restore what order? Did you think the persons there were going to frighten MPs? No! You were not going to frighten them. Were you going to address them? No! You couldn’t have arrested anybody there. So I asked why and the motivation for him to have gone there.”
For him, the invasion of the soldiers in the parliamentary chamber should not have happened in the first place, saying that he was happy that no harm was caused.
Recommending Sanctions
On whether he would recommend sanctions, Mr. Kan-Dapaah stated that he knew, as the President’s representative at the Ministry for National Security, that the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) had been asked to investigate the matter and take appropriate action.
He added that if the investigators came to the conclusion that the action was an unprofessional conduct, the CDS would take the appropriate action, and noted that “I agree with you that nobody should underestimate the significance of what happened.”
Funding for Security
On funding of the security and intelligence agencies, the minister-designate asserted that over the years the security and intelligence agencies had never been given the right amount of money to enable them to do their work as they should.
“It is understandably so, when you do have insufficient resources as we have in these developing countries; there is always the challenge of whether what comes in is wisely spent on education and health, and in most times it is considered that if you don’t have the money to buy chalk where do you get money to buy guns and equipment for the police and the armed forces.
“For many years we have been able to live with this. We have not made sufficient provision and funds but somehow we have been able to have a safe, secure and stable country,” he indicated.
Mr. Kan-Dapaah stated that things were beginning to change and “we believe that it is important for us to find for the security and the intelligence agencies money that they needed to do their work.
“Most importantly, there is the need for us to leverage technology in a way that we do our work, and this is something that needs a lot of money and something that we should be able to get governments to avert their minds to.”
“I must say that over the past four years that I have been in office, I have been able to convince Cabinet, to a very large extent, to devote an essential amount of money to the security and intelligence agencies and we will continue to do that,” he noted.
By Ernest Kofi Adu