Senior Vice President of policy think-tank IMANI Africa says testimonies given by police heads at the Short Commission, smacks of internal police dysfunction.
Kofi Bentil said the accounts of Police Director of Operations DCOP George Alex Mensah and the East Legon Divisional Police Commander George Asare at the Commission’s sitting on Friday shows clearly that things are falling apart.
“I detect internal police dysfunction…There is also a breakdown of the command and control chain… and command and control should never be broken,” he said on Joy News’ news analysis programme, Newsfile.
Mr. Bentil’s comment comes after two days of sitting of the Justice Emile Short-led Commission tasked by the president to investigate the violence that almost marred the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-elections on January 31.
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The police and National Security officials seem to contradict each other in their televised account to the Commission on the disturbances during the polls.
While National Security chiefs who appeared before the same Commission on Thursday claimed that the Police SWAT vehicles used belonged to the Service and the masked men who occupied them were police officers, George Alex Mensah in his account on Friday said otherwise.
He said the Police had no knowledge of the masked men and the vehicle they used.
That same day, the East Legon police commander, in whose jurisdiction the by-election and its related violence occurred, also said although he completely left out of the entire by-election planning process, he was aware of a task force from National Security were deployed to monitor the elections.
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But Mr Bentil who is also a private legal practitioner said the development was worrying.
He is shocked that the Police hierarchy could not bring its officers together to undertake what perhaps was its most basic mandate.
He added that it is never legal for anybody, under any circumstances, to be masked except they were under a very serious clear command and control arrangement in very limited situations where there can be no ambiguity.
“Tomorrow, it can happen at the Jubilee House, Parliament House or it can be any by-election and then somebody brands any pick-up ‘SWAT’ and then masked men just arrive there [to do whatever], and because of what has happened, we will all assume they are from the national security system.
“They will kill everybody and drive away and nobody will touch them. This is where the problem is, when you don’t have this coherent command and control arrangement and we have situations like this and people go unchallenged, we could easily create that gap where terrorists, ordinary people, butchers, criminals can just do us a lot of harm,” he said.
Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa, Sulemana Braimah agrees with Mr Bentil.
He said the narrative of the Police and National Security officials in the past two days has been appalling.
“If there was anybody who thought that as a country, we were secure and that our national security architecture is in place and is functioning, such people will begin to rethink and change their mind to the reality that based on what we have heard in the last two days, our national security isn’t as it should be.”
DCOP George Alex Mensah’s testimony that the Service had no knowledge of the masked men or where they got the branded ‘SWAT’ vehicle from scandalises Mr Braimah.
He questioned why the police looked on and did nothing when the men they did not know caused such chaos in their presence.
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“The fundamental question is ask is so if these were terrorists from Togo and just manoeuvred to brand a car with police inscription and logo, is it enough for the police to tell us that ‘we don’t know them and we don’t know the car ‘ and they just did what they did and left.
“If the police indeed did not know them, the car or were not aware of their operations, how come none of these men was arrested? How come the police did not arrest any of them,” he queried.
The account of the police, therefore, in his view is unbelievable.