Lt. Col. Larry Gbevlo Lartey, the National Security Coordinator
National Security Advisor, Brigadier Nunoo Mensah, might have a spin to the virtual reduction of the country into a commando state by the Mills-led administration as Today’s exposé had shown over the last year.
Yet facts available to Today clearly show that the National Security Council is still operationalizing a secret agenda of clamping down opposition elements, especially in the days up to the 2012 election with their trainee-commandos.
It is a perfect re-enactment of the heady days of the PNDC and NDC (1) where commandos were used in many destabilization acts; including bullying of voters in opposition strongholds, especially Kumasi; but protected and ensured massive electoral fraud in NDC’s Volta Region stronghold.
After some 500 commandos had passed out from three separate trainings at East Legon in the Greater Accra Region and Asutsuare military base in the Eastern Region, another batch of National Security-commando-trainees passed out at a secret ceremony at Da Nyame, a Kumasi suburb which also hosts some array of finest edifice, including the Miklin Hotel.
The Ashanti Regional Coordinating Council is also situated at Da Nyame and perhaps that might have influenced the decision to host the training regiment at the suburb. The trainees completed their intense regiment last Thursday, July 22nd, 2010.
Together with their three instructors from the National Security headquarters in Accra, the trainees lodged at the plush Kumasi branch of Golden Tulip Hotel. The instructors of the exercise were the same as those who led the Asutsuare and East Legon training.
Each trainee had a single room to himself and were camped in the ¢105 rental rooms of the hotel. In all the state spent GH¢39,110 on the 26 trainees exclusive of their eating and other personal allowances.
Then Minister of Interior, Cletus Avoka, although conceded in an interview with Today that the state was engaged in such exercises, he said the exercise was done for some selected few who were supposed to be part of the VIP wing of the presidential security detail. Hon. Avoka was commenting on the Asutsuare, East Legon, training exercises.
Avoka’s assertion became still-born when indeed the number of trainees that passed out on three separate grills from the earlier trainings clearly showed that the trainees that passed out far outnumbered what was required to manage a smaller unit like the VIP section of the presidential security detail.
The location for the training was at the outside of the Da Nyame suburb, which looks more of a secondary forest area than a normal human habitat. The zonal training ground contains some stumps and other big trees, thus distracting the attention of people from the military exercise.
The site for the training was chosen because it was likely to deflect attention of people from the secret training. The trainees went through rigorous exercise that lasted for a week. It started from 15th July, 2010 to 22nd July, 2010. The current batch could not interact freely amongst themselves, like that of the graduands that camped at Asutsuare and East Legon.
Their mean posture, as the paper gathered, would constitute a bother to any onlooker; but investigations have shown that their demeanour was part of the requirement being pursued by the organizers. It is part of the special operation-code that required that people selected by the state security apparatus would be able to put fear in indigenes and other residents in Kumasi, which is the stronghold of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).
The trainees were selected throughout the country, except the Ashanti Region. And the rationale was to garner the requisite loyal commitment from die-hard National Democratic Congress (NDC) supporters, most of whom are unemployed and habour avowed hatred for that region, its residents and indigenes in order to be able to achieve the purpose of the exercise.
Although the 2012 election is some two-and-half-years away, the larger mandate of the seemingly hungry trainees is to take Kumasi by storm on the election day, and carry out any direction, no matter how clandestine it might seem, by their superiors on the day.
The trainees are expected to be part of the state security apparatus in the Ashanti Region. They were taken through the mastery of accurate shooting with some rubber bullets and also worked on their shooting speed.
Originally the current exercise should have taken place at Esem, near Atebubu in the Brong Ahafo Region late last year, but had to be shelved after Today had blown the lid over what was expected to be a secret exercise. That was after the camping ground had been prepared for the exercise.