A Security and International Relations analyst, Adib Saani has said the killing of the Member of Parliament for Mfantseman Ekow Quansah Hayford is “disturbing and distressing,” but not very surprising considering that crime has been on the increase since 2017.
He said records at the Ghana Police Service and Bureau of Public Safety support his claim and that has prompted the United States of America to issue a number of travel advisories to Ghana, one in 2019 and again in September 2020 that points to growing insecurity in Ghana. The Member of Parliament for Mfantseman Constituency in the Central Region, Ekow Quansah Hayford was shot dead by unknown assailants while returning from a campaign trip on Friday 9th October, 2020 around 1:00am.
Speaking to Diamond news on the murder of the Mfanstseman MP, Adib Saani said statistics available also indicate that “there are well over 1.2 million illegal guns in the system and every single year on average, 500 Ghanaians are murdered”.
“According to the same reports, “local (Ghanaian) authorities lack the capacity to counter the threats and for some of us who have been within this space, we know that the threats are dire than we think and this is not coming to us as a surprise” he added.
Adib Saani who is also the Executive Director for the Jatikay Centre for Human Security and Peace Building disagreed with calls for the state to provide security to MPs and described such a move as unsustainable and an unscientific approach to dealing with the security challenges in the country.
He said “we will be failing to deal with the fundamental issues of crime in Ghana. Providing MPs with security is fine, maybe at the personal level they will feel safer, but how about the wider picture – crime increasing and getting worse by the day in the country? Until we approach the issues of crime and investigations holistically and from the fundamentals it can only get worse, unfortunately,” Adib Saani warned.
He however suggested; “rather we should be dealing with issues of modernizing crime fighting in the country, we should be digitalizing investigation processes and also be thinking about training officers more often in line with international practices so the criminals are not always a step ahead of us” Unfortunately for years, “we have reduced fighting crime to just donating pick-ups to the Police when indeed there are some fundamental issues that will include the use of biometric data base and DNA data base to fighting crime in the country, but we seem to have lost focus to dealing with the fundamental issues”
Story By: Edward A. Ken-zorre
