Lt. Gen. Obed B. Akwa
Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), Lt. Gen. Obed Boamah Akwa, has observed that defence deals between African countries on one hand and the United States of America (USA), on the other, have been of help to the continent as far as strengthening its security capabilities and counter-terrorism measures are concerned.
“The existing cooperation between the United States and African partner nations has led, for example, to excessive cooperative maritime security, especially in the Gulf of Aden, in the East Coast and the Gulf of Guinea on the West Coast of Africa,” he said at a roundtable forum organised by the Faculty of Arts, the University of Cape Coast, on the topic, “U.S. Military Presence in Africa: Implication for National Security and Sovereignty.”
According to the CDS, “The United States Trans-Sahara Counter-terrorism Partnership and Partnership of Regional East African Counterterrorism have been instrumental in increasing the capacity of African security forces and the fight against terrorism.”
His comments come on the heels of controversy surrounding the 2018 defence cooperation between Ghana and the U.S., which was recently ratified by parliament.
On Tuesday, 24 April, 2018, Dr. Emmanuel Kwesi Aning, Head of the Department of Research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Accra, said the intentional leakage of sensitive security information by high-profile politicians concerning the various defence deals of 1998, 2015 and 2018 had exposed Ghana to new security threats.
Dr Aning said, “Let me say two things: the content is important, very important but the process and the mechanisms to arriving at the content and how we handle the content is what I am interested in.
He said on Accra-based Starr FM “Let me explain. Very few Ghanaians knew there was a 1998 agreement and its content, much more a 2015 agreement and its content.
People in high office deliberately leaked sensitive information around these agreements and by doing so without placing the interest of Ghana and Ghanaians at the centre of these discussions, have exposed all of us to new threats because Islamic State (I.S.) in the West African Province now says, ‘Oh, so, Ghana, you created a platform for the U.S. to launch attacks against us?’”
Dr Aning added, “If you look at the history of this particular process, it started more than two years ago. What culminated in the 2018 agreement started more than two years ago. When you negotiate with a superpower, and more often than not, for people like us or for small nations like us, on gross resource constraints, you negotiate from a position of weakness. The best you can do is to get as favourable terms as possible based on your own perceptions of the threat that you face and the kinds of things that you hope this agreement will bring.
On whether the agreement is a good or bad one, Dr Aning said, “It’s a mutual agreement; the military will get something. Look! “There is nothing new in this agreement. if you compare the 2015 and the 1998 agreements.”