A retired officer of the Ghana Armed Forces, Captain Budu Koomson, believes prevailing conditions in the country make the staging of a coup d’état imminent.
This, according to him, was because ‘the blatant abuse of state wealth by political operatives can trigger something like this coupled with the political stalemate in the society.’
‘The profligate or reckless abuse of government funds, the political stalemate, the lack of focus of security operators because of political stalemate and the politics that is in the system…I think we have to be very careful,’ he noted, insisting that ‘there is real danger.’
He made the statements during an interview with Accra-based Oman FM.
He emphasized that it was wrong for anybody to downplay the possibility of an uprising in the country.
Captain Budu Koomson, who is Chief Operations Officer with the UT Group of Companies said, ‘I have heard so many people talking about the possibility of coup which means coup is frightening us.’
He therefore stressed the need for government and the security agencies to ‘act very fast and diffuse it’.
Much as he was convinced the military had moved away from a coup mentality, the retired military capo cautioned, ‘Let us know that they are a function of the society; so if the society is talking coup-coup-coup, they are also part of the society, they can think coup-coup-coup’, adding, ‘In the bad old days, the consternation of circumstances on the ground would have triggered a coup d’état long ago’.
‘Whatever it is that is causing this talk, we should diffuse it and diffuse it fast because if you talk it too long, it could possibly happen; whether it will be popular or not popular is a different issue,’ he emphasized.
This, he said, was because ‘when somebody is going to make a coup d’état, he will never come and ask for your permission; he is a dissatisfied person or group of people who decide to do whatever they want to do for whatever reason they see.’
Discontent
Captain Budu Koomson stated that government should not delude itself by thinking that Ghana had passed the stage of coup d’états because there was so much discontent in the country following the Finance Committee of Parliament’s revelation of abuse of state funds by the ruling NDC government.
Captain Koomson expressed concern about the security situation in the country, questioning why government had been sluggish in appointing personnel to fill all the vacancies in the security services.
This, he said, was because ‘the longer the ambivalence is, the longer the inertia and the longer the inertia the more vocal or brazen the forces of adventure or discontent would be’, adding that if he had the chance to advice the President, ‘I will advise him to fill the entire security slots.’
‘The fact that we are relatively stable does not mean that they can misbehave and do what they want to do. There should be fear of personal sanctions so that politicians and public officials would be circumspect in the way they spend our money,’ he emphasized.
He equally expressed utmost surprise at the sudden silence of the National Peace Council after the election, in spite of the seeming tension in the country, stressing the need for it to put pressure on those he referred to as ‘the powers that be’ to expedite action since the situation was fluid.
By Charles Takyi-Boadu