Securities Brainstorm On Rising Crime

From William Yaw Owusu, Akosombo

Monday, 16 October 2006
THE Co-ordinator of the National Governance Programme (NGP), Leonora Kyerematen, has said that the public cannot demand a high level of service from the security agencies when they continue to be under resourced.

"It behoves us to adequately resource and democratise our security services, to ensure their ability to effectively carry out their mandates. It is then that we as a nation can say that we have arrived and can then demand accountability of our personnel," she said at Akosombo on Saturday.

Mrs Kyerematen was speaking at a workshop here for the country’s security agencies on how to strategise to ensure public safety.

The workshop with the theme, "Public safety – role of the security agencies," was organized for about 50 participants by the Ministry of the Interior and sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF), a German political foundation promoting good governance across the globe.

The participants were drawn from the Police, Military, National Disaster Management Organisation, Customs, Excise and Preventive Services, Immigration Service, Prisons Service, the Bureau of National Investigation and the National Commission for Small Arms.

She said the security services over the years had faced challenges such as inadequate office and residential accommodation, staff logistics, obsolete tools and equipment, institutional weakness and poor human resource capacity but the public had sometimes failed to appreciate the conditions under which they worked.

Mrs Kyerematen said continued political will, backed by adequate budgetary allocation, comprehensive institutional reforms and effective inter-agency co-ordination, among other would help re-position the security agencies to be more effective.

Mr Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, Deputy Minister of the Interior, conceded that crimes such as robbery, car snatching, rape, fraud, and manslaughter were at an unacceptably high level. Other such as traffic offences, fires, disasters, proliferation of small arms, human and drug trafficking, smuggling and currency counterfeiting were also serious issues that the security agencies were grappling with.

Mr Agyeman-Manu said the government was committed to adopting the right and appropriate strategies to ensure that public safety remained a priority.

For his part, Benjamin Kumbuor, a Member of Parliament and chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Defence, acknowledged that security agencies were under-resourced and gave the assurance that "we are making efforts to get more resources from the budget for them."

He called for a holistic national security sector policy to make the public to appreciate the need for the security agencies to get enough budgetary allocation.

Isaac Owusu Mensah, Programme Officer of the KAF, said the security sector was a key pillar in the promotion and development of good governance and sustainable democracy and they needed to be given utmost attention to be able to deliver.