Encounters of the security kind
Last Thursday night I got information that the offices of the Danquah Institute were being raided by the security agencies. As this is a place I go to every once in a while, I was concerned and wondered what had brought this innocuous office to the attention of the security agencies.
Advertisement
Early the next morning I heard an account of the raid on the radio. The caretaker of the premises painted a vivid picture of what happened. One sentence in his account struck me. He said when the group of about six men arrived and wanted to be let in to search the premises, he asked for their warrant, which would show they were on a legitimate enterprise. According to the young man, they brushed him aside and told him they did not need a warrant.
Flashback
This startled me and sent my mind racing into the distant past.
First stop is sometime in December 1958 and the scene is the campus of Mawuli School, Ho where my father, S.K. Ohene, was a teacher. At dawn our home is surrounded by a detachment of policemen and the leader of the group informs my father that they have been sent to conduct a search of the house.
(We were later to discover that a similar raid was going on simultaneously in three other homes on the campus. All four of them were friends, my father, A.A.K. Tse, V.O. Anku and E.K. Datsa. A week or so later, a government statement announced that all four of them were banned from working in the Volta Region. That is how my father ended up at Abuakwa State College in Kyebi in what can only be described as internal exile. But that is a different story that could be told on a different occasion.)
Meantime I go back to the December 1958 morning on Mawuli school campus. My father asks the lead policeman for a warrant and the policeman produces one which is scrutinised by my father. Then my father tells the policeman that he and all the other policemen with him should empty their pockets and, this is the breath-taking bit for me, remove their police caps for him to inspect to make sure they haven’t brought anything sinister to plant in his home. The police empty their pockets and remove their caps which are inspected by the very small man S.K. Ohene. The police then enter the house and conduct the search and depart. It is all very polite and civilised.
Next stop, May 15, 1979 and the scene is the home of Flt-Lt Jerry and Mrs Konadu Agyeman Rawlings on the Liberation Road in Accra. Earlier in the day, news had broken of Flight-Lieutenant JJ Rawlings having embarked upon a coup d’etat attempt; it soon became obvious the attempt had failed and he had been arrested and was in custody.
I went to the Rawlings home to give support to Nana Konadu who was my friend. At the time, I had some experience of what happens to someone who was the object of security interest. Soon after I got to the house, there was a knock at the door.
Other Trending Stories
I went to the door, opened it slightly and saw a man who introduced himself as a Captain from the Military Intelligence. (I am afraid I have forgotten his name). He said he was there with two other men, who were still in the car parked under the tree by my car, to search the premises.
Do you have a warrant? I asked him.
He hesitated slightly and asked if I was a lawyer.
No, I answered, but he needed a warrant to enter if he was coming to conduct a search.
Was this not the Rawlings house, and had I been listening to the day’s news?
Yes, this was the Rawlings house and I have been listening to the news, but he still needed a warrant to enter to conduct a search.
He turned round and left. He came back about an hour later, knocked, I got to the door, he introduced himself again and said he was there to conduct a search.
I asked if he had a warrant, he smiled, took out a warrant, which I scrutinised. It looked okay to me even though I am not sure I still know for certain what a legitimate search warrant should look like.
I opened the door, he came in with his colleagues, they conducted the search and left. It was all very polite and civilised.
Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah is credited with a lot of things; democracy and respect for individual liberties are not counted among his tendencies. Around December 1958, the political atmosphere was quite heated in Ghana; the Preventive Detention Act had been passed, much of the Volta Region was under a state of emergency. And yet a schoolteacher could demand a warrant from the police who had arrived to search his house and inspect the pockets and caps of the police before letting them into his house.
In May 1979, the political temperature in Ghana was very hot. Elections were due in a few weeks, the ban on party political activity having only been lifted a few months earlier after years of military rule. A few months earlier, an entrenched military ruler had been thrown out in a palace coup.
I was in the home of a junior Air Force officer who had mounted a coup d’etat earlier that morning. And yet I was able to ask for a search warrant and a Military Intelligence officer went away to get one before he entered the home to conduct a search.
The night of March 24, 2016, some 23 years into the practice of multi-party constitutional government where Ghana is touted as a leading democracy on the African continent, a group of Intelligence operatives and one uniformed policeman are able to forcibly enter the premises of the Danquah Institute and brush aside the caretaker and claim they do not need a search warrant.
Advertisement
I am old enough to acknowledge that we used to live in a more innocent world and security officials now have to deal with a more complicated and brutal world. But I am thoroughly ashamed that a security operative can say in today’s Ghana he does not need a search warrant.
Maybe it is one big charade, this democracy of ours.