State level intelligence analysis: We keep getting surprised. It is not bad luck. It is a choice!
There is a scene that plays out in the highest offices of the most powerful governments in the world every single morning. The President of the United States sits down, usually before 8am, and reads what is called the President’s Daily Brief. It is not a newspaper. It is not a summary of last night’s news neither is it a summary of incidents that happened the day before. It is a classified intelligence document, carefully written, carefully assessed, carefully delivered giving the most powerful person on earth insight on what is happening in the world that he does not yet know, what is developing that could affect America’s interests, and what his intelligence community thinks it means.
The CIA, the NSA, the DIA, the FBI’s intelligence arm, and a dozen other agencies have spent the preceding twenty-four hours collecting, analysing, and arguing about what goes into that document. Analysts have stress-tested their conclusions. Senior officers have pushed back on assessments they find too confident or not confident enough. The whole apparatus would have been working, through the night if necessary, so that when the President opens that briefing book, he is not guessing. He is reading the best available assessed judgment the state of America can produce about the world as it actually is.
Now ask yourself a simple question. How many African Presidents including Ghana’s get the benefit of serious intelligence analytic support towards decisions and governance?
Intelligence is not James Bond or Jason Bourne
Before we go further, let us get something out of the way. When most people hear the word intelligence, they think of spies in dark clothing, intercepted phone calls, surveillance operations, and safe houses. That world exists. But it is not the world that makes the difference in governance. The thing that makes the difference, the thing that separates governments that make good decisions under pressure from governments that are perpetually surprised by events is analysis. Rigorous, disciplined, honest analytical work done by people with high mental agility, clinically selected, trained to think clearly about complex problems and write about them in plain language for decision-makers who do not have time for ambiguity.
Sherman Kent, the American historian who essentially invented modern intelligence analysis, said it decades ago: intelligence is knowledge. Not secrets. The business of collecting information, making sense of it, and delivering that sense to the people who need to act on it.
That is the business Ghana and many African states have never quite managed to take seriously.
What intelligence analysis actually looks like when it works
Let’s consider what happened in the lead-up to the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. The operation itself; the helicopters, the Navy SEALs, the compound in Abbottabad, is the part that gets dramatised in films. What does not get dramatised is the years of analytical work that preceded it. CIA analysts piecing together fragments of intelligence from multiple sources over multiple years. Building a picture, slowly and painstakingly, of a courier network. Assessing, with explicit acknowledgment of their uncertainty, that the compound in Abbottabad was probably bin Laden’s location. Presenting that assessment to President Obama with honest confidence levels, not certainty, because certainty was not available, but structured analytical judgment that gave the President enough to make a decision.
Obama made the call. The operation succeeded. But the decision that made the operation possible was not made in the Situation Room on the night of the raid. It was made, in analytical terms, over years of disciplined intelligence work that gave a President real option instead of guesses.
Again, consider a less dramatic but equally instructive example. When COVID-19 was still being called a novel pneumonia cluster in Wuhan in late 2019, intelligence services in the United States and elsewhere were already beginning to produce assessments about what it might become. Not because they had a crystal ball. Because they had analysts whose job was to watch for exactly that kind of emerging biological threat, to track the early signals before they became headlines, and to tell political leadership what was coming while there was still time to prepare. Some governments listened and got ahead of it. Others waited for the news cycle to tell them what their intelligence services were already trying to say. Did we wait for the news cycle in Ghana and rest of Africa?
What it looks like when it does not work and what that costs
Here is a question that should bother us in West Africa and every Ghanaian more than it does. When Boko Haram went from a fringe religious group in north eastern Nigeria to a force that controlled territory the size of Belgium, killed tens of thousands of people, and displaced more than two million, at what point did Nigeria’s political leadership receive an intelligence assessment saying this movement is becoming dangerous and here is what dangerous looks like in five years?
The answer, from everything the public record shows, is: not early enough. Not in a form that compelled action. Not delivered to political consumers who had been trained to read intelligence assessments and respond to them. Nigeria had security agencies. It did not have, in the functional sense, an intelligence service producing the kind of forward-looking analytical work that would have given its government real options before Boko Haram became a crisis that no one could ignore.
By the time it became impossible to ignore, the options had narrowed from prevention to containment. From cheap to catastrophically expensive. From a governance problem to a humanitarian disaster.
West African states including Ghana watched that happen across our eastern border. Did we draw any institutional lessons from it?
The Sahelian threat and what we are not seeing
Today, Burkina Faso is effectively partitioned. The Malian state controls less of Mali than it did ten years ago. Jihadist groups that started in the Saharan north have pushed through central Mali, through Burkina Faso, and are pressing into the coastal states. Northern Côte d’Ivoire has seen attacks. Northern Togo has seen attacks. Northern Benin has seen attacks.
The map of this expansion, if you draw it honestly, has a direction. And that direction does not stop at Ghana’s border out of respect for our stability or our democracy or our warm relationship with the herdsmen passing through our northern regions. It stops, or does not stop, based on the conditions it finds. The grievances available to exploit. The ungoverned spaces available to occupy. The recruitment networks available to activate.
A functioning intelligence community would be producing regular assessed judgments on exactly this question. Not newspaper summaries. Not randomly collected situation reports on incidents that have already occurred. Analytical assessments of where the expansion is heading, what indicators would tell us the calculus is changing, and what for instance Ghana’s specific vulnerabilities are, the open northern border, the youth unemployment, the ethnic and kinship networks that cross into Burkina Faso in both directions.
Is that work being done? Is it reaching the people who need it? Is it shaping decisions about where to deploy resources, what relationships to build, and what early warning architecture to construct? We may not have enough time on our hand.
The argument some people make and why it does not hold
There is a view, heard often enough within policy circles in Accra and beyond in West Africa, that intelligence analysis is a luxury of wealthy states; that the CIA and MI6 and Mossad can afford elaborate analytical architectures because they have the budgets for them, and we should focus on the basics first. This argument has the causality exactly backwards.
Rwanda in 1994 did not have a functioning intelligence service capable of seeing what was coming. The result was one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century, a country destroyed in a hundred days, and a reconstruction cost in lives, in institutional capacity, in economic development foregone, that dwarfs any conceivable investment in analytical intelligence. Rwanda rebuilt. And one of the first things the post-genocide leadership did was invest seriously in intelligence capability, not because they had suddenly become wealthy, but because they had learned, in the most terrible possible way, what it costs not to see.
Singapore is not a large country. It does not have oil wealth or a vast defence budget. What it has is a government that decided, from independence, that a small country in a complex neighbourhood cannot afford not to know what is coming. Singapore built a horizon-scanning analytical architecture (RAHS) that is now studied by intelligence services around the world. It did not do this because it was rich. It became what it is, in part, because it did this.
Analytical intelligence is not a luxury of good governance. It is a precondition of it.
What the difference would feel like in Ghana
Imagine a Ghana in which the President, before making the decision to commit security resources to the northern border, receives an assessed intelligence brief telling him what the Intelligence community’s analytical units have determined about the current state of extremist network activity in the three northern regions; where recruitment is happening, which communities are most vulnerable, what indicators of escalation the community is currently tracking, and what the assessment of risk over the next twelve months is.
Imagine a Ghana in which the decision about how to respond to the annual flooding of Accra is informed by an intelligence picture not of flooding locations and effects but of the corruption network behind illegal building approvals, the officials, the developers, the financial flows, the political connections so that enforcement is targeted, evidence-based, and resistant to the selective pressure that has historically spared the well-connected.
Imagine a Ghana in which a future pandemic is not first understood through CNN but through an early analytical warning produced by an intelligence analytical community that has been watching the biological threat environment the way the CIA watches geopolitical risk.
None of that requires a CIA budget. It requires analytical seriousness, the decision that this kind of knowledge matters, that the people who produce it deserve to be selected carefully beyond partisanship, trained properly, and listened to honestly, and that the political consumer at the top of the system is going to read what they produce and take it seriously.
That decision has not yet been made in Ghana and many African states in the sustained, structural way that would produce results.
The question worth sitting with
The United States does not start its President’s morning with a classified intelligence brief because it is a superpower. It became and remains a superpower, in part, because it decided early that governing well requires knowing what you are governing in and invested, consistently and seriously, in building the institutional machinery to provide that knowledge.
Ghana governs one of West Africa’s most stable and democratic countries. It sits in one of the continent’s most complex and rapidly changing security environments. It faces threats that are not hypothetical; they are documented, directional, and approaching. The question is not whether Ghana can afford to think seriously about intelligence analysis. The question is whether Ghana can afford not to.
What if someone had told the President before it happened? That is the question an intelligence service exists to make unnecessary.
The author, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe is an Intelligence and National Security Analyst, a former Director General of the Bureau of National Intelligence (2022-2025) and writes on national security and intelligence reforms, risk, integrity assessment and institutional governance in the Ghanaian context.
