A security analyst, Nana Owusu Sekyere, has advised President John Dramani Mahama to declare a state of emergency in the wake of post-electoral violence across the country.
There have been reports of attacks on supporters of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) across the country after the party lost the December 7 election to the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).
The NDC, in a presser on Thursday December 15, threatened to defend itself if the attacks allegedly perpetrated by NPP supporters did not stop.
Contributing to the development on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class91.3FM on Friday 16 December, Nana Owusu Sekyere said the police have failed in their duty of ensuring peace after the polls.
In his opinion, Mr Mahama should declare a state of emergency to bring in the military to control the situation.
“I’m surprised that by now the president has not invoked the constitutional provision to declare a state of emergency…” he stated.
“You are legally mandated when your security agencies, in this case the police service, are unable to handle the issues internally, [to] declare a state of emergency, and that is when you bring in the military, and I was expecting that to happen. We shouldn’t take things for granted because it is clear that our police and our security agencies, mandated to curtail or to hold peace during this election process, have not done the job. If I were the president, I would have declared a state of emergency seeing how this is progressing.”
According to Nana Owusu Sekyere, the violence can degenerate into a tribal conflict if not properly managed. “What is very dangerous again is we are not seeing the ethnocentric aspect, which can evolve out of this petty post-election jubilation violence. We are not seeing it. …Let’s say I’m a Ga and I’m NDC and I get attacked by Fantes from NPP, don’t forget that in NPP there are Gas and Fantes, so then I will turn the situation against my fellow Fantes instead of looking at it from that political level. I will rather look at it from that angle and it will turn rather ethnocentric, so we must be careful or it will drift into something we can’t handle,” he cautioned.
Source: Ghana/AccrafM.com
