Step back and let the agencies lead — Security consultant’s blunt message to interior minister
A security consultant with a clear-eyed view of how Ghana’s recruitment crisis unfolded has a direct prescription for fixing it, and it starts with the Interior Minister getting out of the way.
Richard Kumadoe, speaking on Joy News’ The Pulse, delivered a candid assessment of why the ongoing security services recruitment exercise has descended into confusion, frustration, and public outcry, and he placed responsibility firmly at the door of a centralized approach that he says was poorly conceived and poorly communicated from the outset.
His argument is straightforward: the agencies themselves are not the problem. The problem is the minister’s office.
“The BNI is recruiting people, EOCO might be recruiting people, the military is recruiting people, and they are doing it in line with standard procedure, and it doesn’t create any problem for anybody,” he noted, pointing to a parallel universe of security agency recruitment happening smoothly and without controversy, precisely because it is being managed by the institutions that know their own requirements best.
The contrast with the Interior Ministry-led exercise, which has seen close to half a million applicants competing for roughly 5,000 positions amid widespread complaints about the process, could not be starker. Kumadoe attributed the chaos not to the scale of the challenge but to the manner in which the minister chose to approach it, the language used, the methodology adopted, and the centralized structure imposed, all of which, in his view, created the conditions for exactly the kind of public uproar that has followed.
“The language the Minister of Interior used, and the approach he set in place, is what has created this public uproar and what has created the judgment that is affecting him and his government,” he said.
His solution is as direct as his diagnosis: hand the process back to the individual agencies and let them run their own recruitment exercises according to established institutional procedures, the same way the military, BNI, and EOCO have been doing without incident.
“I am urging the Minister to step aside and allow the agencies to do their recruitment, and we will be fine. This should serve as a lesson to all politicians, whether those in power now or those out of power,” Kumadoe said.
The consultant did not stop at process criticism. He widened his remarks into a broader observation about the administrative culture that he believes is holding Ghana back, describing what he called “ineptitude, arrogance, and lack of resourcefulness” as qualities that have contributed to the country’s current challenges, and implicitly challenging those in positions of authority to reflect honestly on whether those descriptions apply to their own conduct.
For the hundreds of thousands of young Ghanaians who applied for security services positions and found themselves navigating a chaotic, confusing, and demoralising process, Kumadoe’s message may offer little immediate comfort. But his prescription, give the agencies their autonomy back, is one that experience, and the evidence of the current crisis, appears to support.
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