NATIONAL SECURITY: ARE WE SERIOUS?

Hmmm, Ghana - ayeasem oo! At a time when improved explosive devices (IED) and car bombers are killing scores of people round the trouble spots of the world, there is only one way to keep any ruling regime safe and secure in power, in Ghana.

A nation is secure and stable if a majority of its people have a good quality of life and live in a fair and just society, in which all are equal before the law.

The tenure of our leaders will continue to be safe and secure, only if they continue to provide our nation with imaginative, competent, honest and patriotic leadership.

The recent banning of a number of former service and security chiefs from visiting military installations in Ghana, illustrates perfectly the incompetence and bankruptcy of thought of our political class, generally.

Today, a few rockets fired from miles away, can destroy parliament and the Osu Castle in a few minutes - reducing them to rubble and killing hundreds in the process. A crude rocket fired at the presidential plane could achieve the same results as a military coup, could it not?

The earlier our leaders wake up to the threat their insensitivity and greed for money poses to their hold on power and to the stability of our nation, the better it will be for them.

As a society, if we continue to allow an underclass that feels hopeless and despised because life is passing them by, to grow, as a result of their not being able to continue with their education (because their families were too poor to be able to afford paying for their school fees), we ought not to be surprised at all to start seeing suicide bombers striking in Ghana too, at some point, going forward.

Have those in charge of national security ever thought, for example, of the potential threat to society posed by those hordes of scruffy scrap metal "truck pushers" who now roam virtually all our cities and towns nationwide?

They have taken over bus shelters and pavements nationwide, which they have turned into scrap metal exchanges - without a care as to the inconvenience they cause to pedestrians: in a country with one of the highest vehicular accident rates in the world?

Well, those in charge of national security had better get cracking and make sure that all the metropolitan assemblies and other urban local council authorities across our country act to remove those potential armed robbers and rebel fighters from the public spaces they have turned into scrap exchanges, with such impunity and total disregard for the by-laws of local authorities.

Opanin, can you imagine what will happen when the demand for scrap metal falls in China - and the market for scrap metal in Ghana collapses?

Well, your guess is as good as mine how those ruthless and disrespectful fellows, used to earning lots of cash on a daily basis, will quickly diversify into other income-generating activities for that daily income they have become accustomed to earning.

Have the masters of the universe now running Nkrumah's Ghana, thought of such potential threats, too? There is virtually no corner of any urban conurbation that those cheeky chaps don't know.

They could be constituted into a formidable guerrilla group, in the hands of a ruthless warlord seeking to use a civil war here, s a route to power and to Ghana's oil and natural gas revenues - a la Liberian Charles Taylor-style.

If our leaders want to be safe from the wrath of the people, let them govern our nation fairly and ensure that the quality of life of all Ghanaians (not just a privileged and powerful few!) steadily improves.

Hmmm, Ghana - asem ebaba debi ankasa! May God bless and protect our homeland Ghana, always. Long live freedom! Long live Ghana!