Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa
American and Nigerian officials should be wondering what drove our Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa to release classified information during a Chatham House engagement in the United Kingdom.
The minister told the world that Ghana played ball with the United States to allow Donald Trump to use our territory to bomb a part of Nigeria suspected to be harbouring militants.
The American President had alleged that the militants were killing Nigerian Christians and that if President Bola Tinubu did not do anything about it, he would strike. Was the decision to use Ghanaian soil to launch the missile part of the deal reached later? Only Minister Okudzeto can tell us.
Being a classified information, the details should have been guarded until when a declassification is authorised.
Such declassification not yet authorised, our minister appears to have forgotten that he was not on a propaganda mission and opened his mouth rather too wide.
Blending serious assignments such as was expected of him during the Chatham House engagement with typical National Democratic Congress (NDC) propaganda, has unexpectedly earned him not only an unenviable backlash but endangered our national security.
There is a sophisticated network of militants operating in West Africa under assortment of nomenclatures but bound by a common ideology of replacing existing governance structures with theirs, which is based on their weird and own interpretation of Islam, using the barrels of the gun.
They are wrong who think that these militants are a bunch of crude persons wielding AK 47s and RPGs with little or no knowledge of international happenings.
They are abreast with developments on the world scene and would definitely have learnt about what the Foreign Affairs Minister said at Chatham House.
The American response using Ghana as a launch pad, which was vividly elucidated by the minister, should have them thinking about our eagerness to collaborate with foreign forces to disrupt their cause.
A few days ago, they struck in the Northern part of Mali, killing many even as Burkina Faso authorities appear shivering under their daredevil attacks.
The recent attack and murdering of some Ghanaian tomato traders in Burkina Faso by such militants was the closest we came to their sights.
The only country in West Africa which has not experienced the attack of the bad guys is Ghana. Shouldn’t we be discreet in the way we manage classified information pertaining especially to the militants?
While we applaud the Minority in Parliament for quizzing the government over the deal to allow America to use the Northern Region to fire missiles to the suspected den of the militants near Sokoto, we would be quick to add that they should press for immediate answers, the subject under review being a serious one whose national security implications are evident.
Why was parliamentary approval not sought before the executive nod?
We agreed to have West African deportees from America harboured on Ghanaian soil, details about which terms we are still oblivious of.
We recall how out of the blues America decided to alter our visa granting terms from multiple five years to three months and again to the previous order. Was that part of the deal and what monetary gratification followed it?
Just before the bombing took place in Nigeria, a strange aircraft was noticed in a part of the Upper East Region, occupants of which were protected by officialdom. Local youth’s demand for their details never came, compelling us to conclude that the occupants were on a reconnaissance mission ahead of the bombing mission in Nigeria. That part of the Upper East Region frequented by the strange aircraft being somewhat on the same latitude with the location for the bombing run, presents us with another proof of a pre-bombing recce mission.
