Feature: The Silence That Serves No One
In an earlier piece, I described the mystique culture; the deliberate cultivation of fear and opacity by practitioners who find an institution’s reputation more useful than its actual performance. The claim, treated across West Africa as settled doctrine, is that former officers owe their institutions a lifetime of silence. Some go further. Former officers should […] The post Feature: The Silence…
Ghana's intelligence community practices a culture of silence, where former officers are expected to maintain a lifetime of secrecy. This practice, widely accepted in West Africa, is seen as a way to protect the institution's reputation rather than its actual performance. The argument for this silence is that intelligence runs on secrecy, and any public commentary risks damaging trust with serving officers, political masters, and foreign partners.
However, this claim is challenged by historical examples where institutions came out better after facing failures publicly. The 9/11 Commission, the US Senate's pre-Iraq War intelligence review, and Britain's Butler Review all laid failures bare without burning sources or losing partners. The argument that confidentiality extends to the culture of a service rather than just its secrets leads to the conclusion that no former officer should ever speak publicly about intelligence work.
However, this is not the case in Ghana, where many former officers, including K.B. Quantson, Yaw Donkor, and Professor Ofosu Armah, have written extensively about their experiences. The insistence on silence is not a principle but a selectively applied rule against those who might inconvenience the institution. This silence is a result of inherited dogma and a lack of critical examination of intelligence practices.
The region's intelligence agencies need to adopt a more critical and adaptive approach, similar to Israel's post-1973 conflict, where a permanent devil's advocate unit was established to challenge assumptions and improve methods. The "this is how we have always done it" mentality is a significant barrier to progress in Ghana's intelligence community.
Written by urgent.news from The Chronicle Ghana's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
