NTOABOMA—Nothing teaches a populace patriotism and national pride like universal conscription. From the early days of the Kingdom of Mumprugu, the Asante Kingdom, Dahomey and the various illustrious states that now adorn the vast terrains of Ghana, conscription was an integral part of national defense. History shows that conscript armies are not a problem.
On the other hand, mercenary armies are a problem. They can neither be trusted, nor relied upon, at least in the long term. Ghana is victim to a mercenary army that calls itself the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF).
For my own part, I consider the discussion of this matter as nothing less than a choice between freedom and slavery: and in equal proportion we must be free to debate the issue. We can arrive at the truth only in this fashion, and fulfill the great responsibility, which we hold to the Supreme Being; to our Ancestors; and to our country, our heritage, Ghana. At such an appalling time in our history, if I hold back my opinion, I should consider myself as guilty: first, of treason towards my heritage and second, of disloyalty toward the majesty of God and the memory of our Ancestors, which I revere above all earthly powers.
History is vital in understanding what the Ghana Armed Forces was, what it is now and what it shall yet become.
Essentially, what Ghana has had since independence, from British terrorists in 1957, is a mercenary army, whose members are paid to march with imported American or Russian weapons on independence day; paid to drive around American- and Japanese-made lorries without direction and paid to launch coup d’états at will without concern for law and order. The Ghana Armed Forces is a group of people who look like they are defending the country when in actuality they are free loaders. More, they have no idea how to defend their own dilapidated barracks, let alone a country. Worse, they are the remnants of an erstwhile occupying force.
To be eligible for the Ghana Armed Forces, one has to be between the ages of sixteen and thirty, not married and not bonded. Soldiers are paid revenue generated by other Ghanaians, who must go to work and produce materials that the nation can sell to other nations—usually under market value. This too has reverberations in the untrustworthiness of this mercenary army.
Currently the number of active mercenaries in the Ghana Armed Forces is a paltry 13,500, with zero active reserve personnel, even though annually the number of Ghanaians who reach military age hovers around 530,000. Nevertheless, this small army is given the mandate by the government of Ghana to defend over 238,000 square kilometers of land, some 540 kilometers of coastline and over 2,400 kilometers of shared borders. This tiny army is tasked with fighting to defend over twenty-six million people, half of whom, at least, can wield their own machetes, guns and swords, and defend themselves.
What is the future of our country with such mercenaries who claim to be defending it? I do not know of a way of judging the future of Ghana but by the past. And judging by our past, I wish to know what in the conduct of this Colonial Army (now the Ghana Armed Forces) for the last six decades justifies their being renewed every year as the military for protecting Ghanaian sovereignty.
Compared to the real armies of yesteryear, of several Ghanaian states that now makeup the territory called Ghana, the Ghana Armed Forces is a pathetic shadow. The total potential strength of the Porcupine Warriors of the Asante Kingdom, alone, in the early 1800s was some 80,000 active men, which increased to about 200,000 men from its reserve personnel. In one instance in 1811, in the Ga-Fante war, when a coalition of Asante and Ga-Dangme military might fought against the alliance of Fante, Akwapim and Akyim military prowess, more than 300,000 men on both sides combined, fought and died.
The tiny Ewe state of Agave alone, without calling on other sister states from the East, could muster more men in the 1800s to submerge the current fighting force of the Ghana Armed Forces in one day. Such was the steely discipline and the sheer reverence of the call to arms! Combined with the Anlo and the Gbeto Warriors of the far East Kingdom of Dahomey, to mention but a few, these states could all muster troops in the hundreds of thousands for duty throughout the 1700s and 1800s. The Mumprusi were no slouch either!
So what happened in the twentieth century to Ghana’s traditional state military capacity? What happened to the professional clans with hundreds of years of military experience—what happened to the Asafo clans of Asante, of Anlo, of Ga-Mashie, of Ada, of Dagbon, who once organized and fought among themselves and against British terrorist invasions, against slave raiders and against Western imperialism that ravaged the West African terrain?
What happened to the Porcupine Warriors, what happened to the Gbeto and what happened to all the Asafoatses of the land, so much so that we are now left with a fighting force of only 13,500 mercenaries paid monthly to defend our sovereignty? For my part, whatever anguish it cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst and to provide for it.
Kwame Nkrumah and his western educated friends pissed away a rich cultural and traditional military heritage in 1957. They pissed away a trove of knowledge. They eradicated a concoction of absolute courage, sheer will and steely character that traditional armies exemplified. Surprisingly, Nkrumah and co. were rather the better half of the western educated minds of our twentieth century capital, political and military demise. Come to think of it!
The other half of our Mission School boys actually wanted no standing military, preferring to stay under the British Colonial Terrorism Cartel, preferring to be protected by their African mercenaries, some of whom emerged from the Glover Hausas of 1865 to defend the sanctity of their illusion of “sovereignty.”
In wasting away this vast experience in warfare and military organization situated within the auspices of the sovereign states of Ghana, Nkrumah picked up where the British terrorists had left off. Rather than reconstitute our state armies and arm them with modern weaponry, he rather chose to make the mercenary army that terrorized our traditional states the official military of the Republic of Ghana. Nkrumah gave the men who were hewn from the insidious traditions of the Royal African Terrorist Corps and from the Glover Hausas (used in a terrorist campaign against Asante in 1873) the official army of the Republic of Ghana.
Our independence from the British carefully sits within this uncomfortable interstice of weakness, which seems not to have escaped the “superior” knowledge of our so-called fine-minds.
The Ghana Armed forces, no doubt, has its roots in British terrorism and nothing else. British interests during the period of the Slave Trade and trading in general in the West African sub-region gave rise to the British establishment of a defense organization called The Royal African Company to contain Ghanaian opposition and stem the competitive aspirations of Ghana’s traditional metropolitan powers.
One notorious British terrorist, Sir George Goldie constituted the African company into The Royal Niger Company. Later, Sir Charles MacCarthy, one of the earliest leaders of the British terrorism mob of the Gold Coast and Nigeria, organized this force into a Regiment of three companies called the Royal African Colonial Corps of Light Infantry to prevent Asante porcupine raids into his so-called domain. This company was reconstituted into the Gold Coast Constabulary in 1879 and then incorporated into the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) officered by the British and British NCOs and which became an integral part of the British Terrorist Army in Ghana mainly for the maintenance of internal security and defense of the colonial territories.
From this history of a nerve-racking terrorism meted out to the masses of Ghanaians, the Ghana Armed Forces was born. Not from the superior, more enlightening, better disciplined traditional armies with hundreds of years of experience in military tactics and warfare, but from the disparate constitution and reconstitution of jobless, lazy, tax-payer money seeking schoolboys of British Mission school training. This irony has not been lost on our nation.
As if the humiliation of this history was not bad enough, the Ghana Air Force was established in 1959 under the supervision of actual Indian and Israeli officers. Not Ghanaians! An Indian Air Commodore was the first Commander of the Ghana Air Force; not the great grandson of Otumfuo Karikari or the great granddaughter of Mawi, the Gbeto Warrior Queen. Stalking in the shadows of prior Ghanaian traditional military power, this small fry of a gang that is supposed to enshrine and defend the ethos, mission and pride of the Ghanaian military establishment is lost in this notorious embarrassing and Pecksniffian historicity.
The Ghana Armed Forces cannot boast of a single submarine, destroyer, aircraft carrier, tank, self-propelled gun (SPG), towed artillery, multiple launch rocket system (MLRS), attack helicopter, fixed wing attack aircraft, or interceptor. Only about 300 armored vehicles, some 30 planes and some 20 boats! And the sources for this information? The CIA of the United States, Wikipedia and other public domain sources.
The official website of the Ghana Armed Forces is stuck in a time warp, sporting a clunky design, demonstrably representative of the state of mind of the officers. A combination of poor quality imagery—mostly of officers and men singing churchy hymns from actual hymnals and others gifting meaningless placards to one another—with tiny fonts and garish colors, in conjunction with the limiting frames that minimize the site to a small window in the center of the screen, make the experience of finding any information daunting and frankly, off-putting. It looks awfully similar to a 1991 website built by the six-year-old son of an influential mercenary officer.
Once again, the mockery of an armed forces is not lost on all of us. That members of an ignorant organization who have no allegiance to the state of Ghana nor to their traditional clans and states will be called upon daily to defend our inviolable rights and privileges as Ghanaians is stupefying. Indeed, their only historical achievement include two projects which have nothing to do with Ghana’s defense: (1) helping British terrorists win a couple of needless world wars in Burma and beyond and (2) peacekeeping in Lebanon and a few other African nations that also seem incapable of getting their acts together.
Still the pawky sardonicism of Ghana’s military incapacity plagues us even today. After emerging from decades of British terrorist colonial occupation, it conveniently saw no other way to help Kwame Nkrumah rebuild our traditional states but to overthrow him, to overthrow the first President of our Republic, with the elaborate help of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States. With this move, the military finally signaled its real purpose on Ghanaian soil—an occupying force.
From this account, the Ghana Armed Forces appear to be a tool only of western imperialism. How did Kwame Nkrumah and his ilk overlook this very discomforting aspect of the Ghana Armed Forces? How did he square this foundation with the formidable task of nation building? How did they come to inherit this swaggering intonation of British imperial terrorism as the official defense force of Ghana?
Here the CIA and the United States are key since it is the U.S. Army that has now succeeded in invading the sovereign territory of Ghana without having fired a single musket. Chopped from the venal beginnings of colonial terrorism, it is no brainer that an army of mercenaries dotting the skylines of Ghana has no problem with supporting foreign occupying forces and overthrowing the choices of the masses. Our nation has been summarily invaded by the U.S. without a single shot fired from an actual Ghanaian soldier.
The United States Army has annexed every piece of Ghanaian land from a tiny headquarters in Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany without a fight. Just two hundred years ago, hundreds of thousands of Porcupine Warriors, tens of thousands of Gbeto Warriors, thousands of Ga-Dangme soldiers would have taken up positions in a disciplined alliance to defend their states. Not this Ghana!
In reality, the U.S. Army has invaded all African lands except Egypt. But misery loves company. To this point alone, I must inconceivably give these Ghanaian mercenaries a break. To this point alone, we are not wallowing unaccompanied in this sorry state of affairs. However, the fact that a miserable Ghanaian Armed Forces shares much in common with Nigeria’s miserable Armed Forces, which is also incapable of dragging out a putrid gang of western funded Boko Haram cranks—unless of course the United States can invade it—is nothing to be proud of.
In fact, this is evidence enough that what we have in Ghana is not a fighting force capable of guarding the sovereignty of the nation, but an occupying force, a continuation of the activities of the British terrorism cartel newly handed over to Yankee operations.
The U.S. has a military base in Ghana. (This may come as a shock to many.) The Yankees even have the bravura to call their base in Ghana, AFRICOM or the nickname, USAFRICOM, with an operating budget of some 276 million dollars per annum. Who cares about this U.S. Africa Command? Well, I do. And this is why.
The government of Ghana will tell you that this reading of a U.S. invasion is not accurate, that the GAF is only collaborating with the U.S. Armed Forces to build a “better fighting force” in Ghana. However, are foreign fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation in Ghana? Have we shown ourselves to be so unwilling to be reconciled that a foreign army must be called in to win back our love for one another?
Let us not deceive ourselves. USAFRICOM is an implement of war and subjugation, the last argument to which empires in decline resort. Why does Africa need a foreign military gang on its soil, with a full-blown drone base in Niger, if its purpose is not to force us into submission? Can civilized men assign any other purpose to it? Has Anglo-America any enemy in this quarter of the world to call for this accumulation of navies and armies?
No, the fact is that they don’t have enemies here. USAFRICOM is meant for us; it can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains of slavery, which the Anglo-American empire has been forging for so long. And what have we to oppose them? Shall we try the Blackface Anglo-American mercenary army called the Ghana Armed Forces?
Essentially, Ghana has no Armed Forces. There’s no difference between an American soldier and a Ghanaian mercenary. This is troubling, for there is no nation without a solid military to protect it. There is no nation without a dedicated force to ensure its sovereignty and protect the rights and civil liberties of its citizens. Unfortunately, Ghana is not a country. It is a United States territory, in effect. The staggering revelation apparent here is that since 1909 when the Queenmother of Ejisu, Gbetohemaa Yaa Asantewaa, lost the last Anglo-Asante war, this part of the world has never had its independence from Anglo-Americans.
The Ghana Armed Forces is inseparable from the Yankee Army. The U.S. and Ghanaian mercenaries now cooperate on numerous joint training exercises through the U.S. Africa Command, and there is an International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, a Foreign Military Financing program, as well as numerous imperialist affairs projects of the Yankees in Ghana. Although the smart Yankees like to call these programs “bilateral” relationships one would be hard-pressed to find evidence of a GH.COMMMAND on any land in the United States of America.
So Ghana, on the other hand, like a lazy prostrate toad, continues to avail herself to what the Americans quite cunningly call the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program, in which the U.S. facilitates the development of an interoperable imperialist capacity in Ghana. The GAF has also enlisted all of Ghana’s mercenary army into the North Dakota National Guard, under the auspices of the U.S. State Partnership Program. North Dakota is a state in the United States. Meanwhile, the Ghanaian taxpayer dishes out the military budget of these mercenary Yankee armies posing as the Ghana military to the tune of about 0.4 percent of GDP each and every year. With this budget, how is this even an army?
As if this was not bad enough. Our own elected officials—Ghanaian parliamentarians and other government officials—who, I suppose, were appointed to make our nation grow stronger and bolder, have also adopted U.S. congressional and state legislative practices and participate routinely in programs designed to address issues of interest to the American terrorist empire, which is the biological son of British colonial occupation. Conceivably enough, these so-called fine minds in our own country cannot come up with their on congressional and legislative practices! How then do we recoup taxpayer monies lavished on their expensive education?
Furthermore, through the U.S. International Visitor Program, youth exchanges and study abroad programs, which are now robust and growing between U.S. and Ghanaian universities and NGOs, the Yankees are completing the square on total imperialism. At the U.S. state level, the State Partnership Program aims to promote exactly this level of a wide spectrum dominance of Ghanaians and their resources, with the so-called greater economic ties between Ghana and U.S. institutions, which are invariably helmed by the U.S. National Guard.
What we have in Ghana then is a kangaroo Armed Forces funded at every whim by the Ghanaian taxpayer when they retreat into their barracks. What we have is a kangaroo force trained and funded by the Yankees to carry out the Yankee-masters’ will. This kangaroo army is not here to ensure that every Ghanaian has the right to live and thrive in a sovereign nation; it is here to ensure that this Yankee territory called Ghana remains within the total realm of America’s full spectrum dominance. Colonialism then never left these shores. For a fleeting moment when our dignity could have been restored, we blew the chance.
We are again occupied by the forces of inferior paleness—Anglo-American terrorism. We are again plagued by the nonlinear war of disinformation and misinformation, led primarily by our western and mission school educated elite who look up to Jesus Christ as their Lord and personal savior. The Ghana Armed Forces prides itself on Peace Keeping Operations around the world that are led, funded and organized by American and Canadian field commands. Because this is what Jesus would do, I guess?
Apart from these peacekeeping operations, the GAF has nothing to boast about. Not once has it succeeded in defending the constitution against any invasion – internal or external. In fact, it has rather become more interested in establishing a bank at Burma Camp (another reminder that their camps are mostly named after foreign entities), veering notoriously far from what was supposed to be its core duty after independence.
What duty, they would ask?
The biggest elephant in the room cannot go without mention: the tyranny of the mission school elite. All of which to say that you cannot make a husband out of a ho. For Ghana to have a responsible military, dedicated to the people, answerable to the whims and caprices of our peoples, it must begin with the traditional states, not a foreign imperialist terrorist establishment imposed on us by force. It must start from the hundreds of years of military prowess garnered by the various Asafo clans across the country, not from the bad instincts of looters. I believe this is the only way to build a country. We need to start having a nation again. This is the only way to build a country capable of never surrendering its stool or skin to anyone – not to the Yankees, not to anyone!
If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending, if we mean not to basely abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged since the first Anglo-Asante war; since the first Franco-Dahomeyan war; and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight! I repeat, we must fight for our sovereignty! For as of now, we do not have it.
Narmer Amenuti doesn’t shy away from tackling the big, the hot and the provocative issues of our times. He presents the history of the Ghana Armed Forces, vis-a-vis the historicity of our traditional armies before it, in concise fashion and refutes the moral, historical, traditional, customary and legal basis for the preeminence of a Colonial Army turned National Guard as the fighting force for the defense of Ghana. This dissection can be replicated across Africa and the patterns that emerge are strikingly similar.
Narmer implores us to look deeper and find out why we have become a laughing stock in the world; why we have been invaded by USAFRICOM without the firing of a single musket in protest; and why we have turned a blind eye to one of the most serious institutions of our independence struggle – the Ghana Armed Forces.
Enjoy!
So, this essay is trying to say that I live in a bubble. That this country I live in called Ghana is actually under colonial occupation and not free or sovereign. That our Ghana Armed Forces is actually an American force stationed here to ensure the integrity of the territory of America’s Ghana – it is not a military of free peoples. That our leaders already sold out our birthright to the Anglo-Americans and that they are only the field officers stationed here in Ghana to patrol this slave plantation. That I am no free human being but a slave allowed to roam free for the moment. That my children will one day look at me and my friends and wonder what we did about the situation. That my children and grandchildren are going to look back at me and see only cowardice, not bravery. That generations to come, if they are able to break free from this yoke, will look back at this moment and call it another colonial period. From a British Colony to an American Colony. All that changed was the name of the colonizer.
We are pathetic. Thanks Narmer Amenuti, at least you are brave enough to face the painful truth of our subjugation. All this with a bunch of PhD tooting fellas, and fellas with long, very long degrees from Harvard, Oxford, etc., and their high falutin aura they carry around as if they were the smartest organisms that walked the planet. As if the only thing holding them back was their own country. Well, you aren’t smart at all!
So look, if you went to fancy school somewhere and got an A in some physics classes, and you are still living somewhere thinking the worst about Ghana, you are absolutely a one-track-minded organelle. You don’t matter. You are nothing! The British student who gets a bachelor of arts degree from the lowest ranked school in Britain is smarter! The American students are smarter. Ghanaian students are a bunch of robots or there would have been thousands of articles about this military subjugation we have in Ghana. And that includes me. Well, I can only say that I am a product of my environment. I have failed my people. I have failed those who spent so much money on me to obtain some education to help them. This is a sad day for me! It takes too awfully long to realize simple truths in our quarter of the world.
Yes, but Brother Solomon Azumah-Gomez, conscientiously active participation in our Grandmother Africa Scholars’ Community can become one of those first steps in our thousands of miles journey in continuation of our Afrikan people’s Freedomfighting towards definitive victory! Led by our New Breed of Gbetohemaa Sheroes-in-the-making, with Freedomtorchlights like Grandmother Africa, the definitive Maatubuntumandla victory of our Pan-Afrikan Liberation Long March is certain!
I wholeheartedly agree. I have seen real promise here. Just sheer bravery in the execution of thought!
A PERSONAL JET PLANE GIFT TO PRESIDENT MAHAMA IN GHANA?: “Na true?” When you make an elementary examination of the Website, it is Obviously No! A lot of the anti-NDC propaganda is too childishly fraudulent to be taken seriously! Some of us are only interested in challenging the NDC, as the party being puppeteered in government to administer Neocolonialism in Ghana today, on its chequered record, which honestly has some bright spots of impressive work amidst the overwhelming failures! None of the other maintream Establishment poiltical parties, let alone the NPP, is offering anything realistically better, in spite of the deceptive promises! None of them, not even the CPP, has up till now given any credible answer to the crucial question of the politico-military way and means of effecting real Change to deliver all the promises they are making from their grandstands of the neocolonialist bourgeois Politricks of Pseudo-Democracy! This is the crux of the matter addressed boldly by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah from the lessons of the 24th February 1966 reactionary coup d’etat in his classic masterpiece: “Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare”! Relevant to this is the latest spectacularly brilliant contribution on the so-called Ghana Armed Forces made by Brother Narmer Amenuti in the uniquely awesome Pan-Afrikan Liberation Truthpowerhouse of “Grandmother Africa”! Dare to study it, together with Sister Nefetiti’s earlier contribution on the robotization of politics, for the necessary reality check on authentic Politicks in Ghana, Afrika and the World today!
Our eyes are so transfixed on the crumbs beneath that we wage petty fights against ourselves over the “Borla food” that we forget that there are real cakes on a table right behind where other humans are siting at that table eating all they can eat without end with forks and knives made from actual silver mined from our own backyard!
Narmer Amenuti’s essay combined with what Nefetiti has taught us this week go to the root of a mentality problem. The problem lies squarely, as they have both studiously and artfully illustrated, in the bosom of the tyranny of the mission school elite. This is the biggest most violent usurpation of power in Ghana, from the traditional states, and for that matter Africa that has still to be appreciated and understood. Well put Kofi Mawuli Klu.
Thanks for being circumspect, Kofi Mawuli Klu!
It’s quite a shame that I was born into this Ghana. I wish I was born and fought and died in the Sagrenti War. At least I would have died with some dignity and would have been buried with a fashionable sniper’s funeral. The chilling part of this whole issue about what we call the Ghana Armed Forces is that most will read it and not flinch. Most of us will read this and our minds and hearts will not boil over as it would have if we were Ewes and the Asantes had come to occupy our lands.
The fact that we haven’t made a nation out of these strong disparate parts of our heritage speaks to the level of our intelligence. As Solomon Azumah-Gomez says, “we are not smart at all.” I am sorry to sound downtrodden, but this essay makes me feel no other way.
How do we even rise against this kind of military establishment? Until a smart leader is elected president and surgically wills this foundation away and reconstitutes something more formidable and representative of the country we will continue to have our lands invaded and our people enslaved.
Rise wisely we must …; it is gradually but certainly happening! We can see its stirrings if only we look not only at the situation boiling in Azania/South Africa right now, but also carefully into the actual grassroots of our pockets of Resistance in other parts of the continent and diaspora of Afrika that can become the contested zones Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah wrote about in his “Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare”! The point is that many of the so-called educated elite who talk wishfully about Changemaking in Afrika are even afraid to study seriously for creative practical application such works of the Osagyefo and the likes of Frantz Fanon about the very necessary politico-military organisational aspects of Pan-Afrikan Liberation by the independently organised masses of our people!
While it is not as easy as casting a ballot in robotised electioneering exercises, real Change can still be made if we go back into the grassroots of our stirring indigenous Communities of Resistance to study critically, together with the impoverished masses of our disenfranchised Wretched of the Earth, the “Handbook” of the Osagyefo and the contributions being made in its vein to Grandmother Africa. Together with recollections of the historical experiences of our own people’s indigenous community military sagas, you will be amazed at the outcomes! For example, why do we not write and talk more about lessons for our contemprary times from the 1915-1919 Kwahu Asafoman “Bolshevik-like” Rebellion of the masses, led by their own Asafo People’s Militia led by their Asafoakyefo, guided by their own indigenous revolutionary knowledge which got expressed in their own type of “Manden Charter” of 1917!?! (https://www.jstor.org/stable/217151?seq=1…:
The Asafo of Kwahu, Ghana: A Mass Movement for Local Reform under Colonial Rule
Jarle Simensen
The International Journal of African Historical Studies
Vol. 8, No. 3 (1975), pp. 383-406
Published by: Boston University African Studies Center
DOI: 10.2307/217151
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/217151
Page Count: 24)
Winning the now simmering battles for the Decolonization of Education, as being spearheaded in Ghana by the New Breed of young Freedomfighters coalescing from their various grassroots community groupings into the Ghana Youth and Student Changemaking Alliance (GYASCA), should open the doors for such decolonising learning of our own historical experiences of Afrikan Revolts that may be the turningpoint towards the victorious Pan-Afrikan Liberatory Change we are yearning for!