Minority unhappy about privatisation of Defence Cooperation Agreement
The Minority in Parliament is worried about what it says is the privatisation of the Defence Cooperation Agreement Ghana reached with the United States of America.
Ghana, by a Parliamentary resolution, in March 2018, reached the enhanced defence agreement with the US to govern security cooperations between the two countries.
Aviation Minister, Joseph Kofi Adda, in an answer to a Parliamentary question said McDan Aviation, pursuant to that agreement, has signed a contract with the Americans to provide it with logistical services.
“Pursuant to the Ghana government agreement with the United States, McDan has also signed a management agreement with the United States military, and provides logistics and handling services to the US military through Terminal 1,” he told the House in Accra yesterday.
According to Mr Adda, MP, Navrongo Central, the ground floor of the terminal has been rented out to the Ghanaian logistics company as a logistics operations centre for 15 years from January 2019.
But the Minority contended, involving McDan in the agreement was a breach of what Parliament approved.
“When we ractified the agreement, we were not told as a Parliament that, it would move beyond state-to-state because it was a Ghana-USA enhanced defence cooperation agreement,” Minority Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa told journalists.
“When did a private entity come in? The question is what is McDan doing that the government of Ghana can’t do with their American counterparts?” he asked.
The Americans, Mr Ablakwa said, were not dealing with McDan through a private entity, but through the US military and wondered why Ghana had decided to undertake such a critical security arrangement with a private firm.
“I am very worried about the security implications [of this arrangement] because this is about logistics, about freight, transportation of all manner of things. It could be weapon or drugs. All kind of things can happen on our blind side,” he said.
The Minority, Mr Ablakwa, MP, North Tongu said intended to write to the Americans to understand the arrangement between them and McDan.
He expressed dissatisfaction at the decision by the government of Ghana to allow such an arrangement with a private entity which is not accountable to the Ghanaian people when the Americans were still keeping the agreement at a state level.
“I’m really at a loss as to what is going on. We want the details of the agreement,” he said.
To him, subletting the agreement to a private entity is a betrayal of Parliament because “the agreement we ratified, it is not stated anywhere that we will engage private entities. It was a Ghana Us agreement and so how did a private entity come in?”
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
