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The Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) has defended its decision to sack some 501 military recruits in December 2015 for staging an unauthorised protest which officials say was mutinous.

According to the Chief of Staff at the General Headquarters, Brigadier General Sampson Kudjo Adeti, the action of the recruits was a serious offence by which "they could have been arrested, tried through the Court Marshall, and if found guilty, be made to face a firing squad”.
 
"We could not guarantee that the recruits would be good stewards should they be penalised and thereafter enlisted into the army", Brigadier Gen Adeti said.

He made the disclosure when the leadership and members of the ECOWAS Community Development Programme (ECOWAS CDP) Media Network paid a courtesy call on the Military High Command.

The recruits, who were undergoing a six-month mandatory training at the Army Recruits Training School (ARTS) at Shai Hills on December 3, 2015 were said to have staged an unauthorised assembly on the school square, marched to the instructors’ accommodation and demanded to be sent home because the training was strenuous.

They were said to have considered their training as maltreatment and an affront to their human rights.

But the military high command responded swiftly by halting the training and dismissing the entire squad on December 24, 2015 after a preliminary investigation report indicted them for unlawful conduct.

Military Tenets

Brigadier Adeti noted that the recruits refused to obey basic military tenets by defying the orders of their superiors.

“That was the very first time in the history of the GAF trainees assembled themselves to defy the orders of their superiors and asking for a review of standards that have existed for a very long time”, he said.

He pointed out that investigations and dispensation of justice in the service was well laid out, and hence, recommendations by the investigative board which sat on the case were applied.

“It was not a pleasant decision to make but we did so a in a fair manner that posterity would never find anything wrong with it”, he stated.

“Under no condition would the dismissed recruits be ever enlisted into the army. They had their chance and they played with it”, he added.

Brigadier Adeti also stressed that the GAF would not be distracted by ignorant spins by sections of the public who were not well informed, but were “adding to the stories making rounds in connection with the incident”.

“That chapter is closed, there’s no order that has counteracted the decision of the army so far, and we have moved on”, he said.

Indiscipline

Brigadier Gen. Adeti was of the view that whereas not all 501 could have been guilty of the offence, the attitude of those who might not have been guilty have clearly gone to show that by extension of the Ghanaian attitude, “we condone wrong doing”.

“Indiscipline has become a national cancer. We must be bold to confront people and point out to them when they liter the environment or engage in acts that could have far reaching consequences for the nation”, he counselled.

Election Deployment

The CoS also announced that some 6,000 soldiers would be deployed to provide security services for the November 2016, general elections.

The number, he said, was necessary since some parts of the country could only be accessed by the Navy and Airforce.

The combined military force, he said, would complement the police in the area of distribution of election materials and internal security, among others.

"We are revising our notes and adding dynamic trends, since notes used for 2008 and 2012 cannot be used for 2016, since the dynamics for the conduct of the exercise were not likely to be the same", Brigadier General Adeti emphasised.