Bryan Acheampong’s statement that his party, the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) will not hand over power to the National Democratic Congress (NDC), after the forthcoming 7th December general election, is no more rhetorical nor positional statement, as believed by some section within the security and political landscape.
A positional statement as described by its proponents are statements made by persons with the aim to protect their fears, interests and needs. Unfortunately, the constant repetition of this statement by Bryan Acheampong is absolutely beyond positional statement, and rather threaten the democratic success achieved by Ghana for the past years.
For this reason, Ghana Police Service must be of high concern to model Bryan Acheampong’s name to their 2024 election security threats profile list to enable them mount a critical surveillance to monitor his day to day activities and to further identify his intent, capability, and his motivation behind his utterance that has the high tendency to jeopardize the peace and stability of our beloved country, Ghana, before, during and after the election.
Analysing the open-source information on Bryan Acheampong’s historical well-orchestrated attack launched on some sections of NDC members during the 2019 Ayawaso West Wuogon by- election through strategic use of state sponsored fake uniformed personnels from the SWAT detachment, which led to one person’s leg amputated, Bryan Acheampong is capable of exploiting the vulnerabilities within the Ghana Police Service and other sister security institutions based on the pattern analytical tool. He can repeat the same tactics by using fake personnel with state security uniform being it police or the military to intimate and subvert votes in his opponent strongholds.
Both the NPP and the NDC must also understand that such election security risk can not only be handled by the state security, for this matter, they must also be on high alert to ensure effective and efficient security control measures to block any act that has the tendency to plunge this country into chaos. They should be more careful about insider threat who sell their information out.
This calls for the election security task force to monitor and put in robust security control measures to block all the loopholes that can be exploited to the disadvantage of election outcomes.
By Anthony Acquaye
Security Policy Expert at the Centre for Security Dialogue and Peace Advocacy,