Ghana Reforms Everything. Will It Ever Get To The Intelligence Services?

The writer

In Ghana and across West Africa, people will march for electoral reform. They will write angry op-eds about judicial independence. They will fill conference halls to talk about police reform, civil service reform, local government reform, land reform, and educational reform.

Politicians promise reform and create Ministries and Agencies for public sector reforms. Civil society scores reform. Committees investigate reform. The word has been used so many times in this part of the world that it has almost stopped meaning anything.

But nobody, and I mean almost nobody, talks about intelligence reform. Why?

Not the political parties. Not the think tanks. Not civil society. Not the journalists who love to investigate institutional failure. Not the academics who teach security studies. Not the parliamentary committees that are supposed to oversee the national security sector. And certainly not the former intelligence officers who spent years inside these institutions and know, better than anyone sitting outside, exactly what is broken and why.

Let that sink in for a moment. Ghana has had loud, sustained, sometimes bitter public conversations about almost every major public institution. The Electoral Commission has been reformed, litigated, and debated until most Ghanaians can tell you roughly what it does. The Ghana Police Service has absorbed more commission reports, civil society pressure, and parliamentary inquiries than anyone has the patience to catalogue. The Judicial Service, the education service, the health system, the civil service; all of them have active public reform constituencies that show up, make noise, and occasionally get results.

And the intelligence services? The country walks quietly past their long, high double-layered walls and talks about something else. This is not about ignorance alone, though ignorance does a lot of the work. It is about a culture, sustained by social pressure, institutional habit, and a carefully cultivated mystique that has placed the intelligence service in a category of its own. The entity above scrutiny, beyond accountability. The one institution in a democracy that somehow does not have to explain itself to the people funding it.

The Conversation We Are Not Having

Think about what it would actually take to have a serious public conversation about intelligence reform in Ghana. It would require asking basic questions. What do the Intelligence Services actually produce? What analytical assessments have they delivered to the President and the National Security Council over the past twenty years? How has anyone evaluated whether those assessments were any good? What does training look like for the people doing the analytical work? Is the institution producing the kind of forward-looking intelligence that serious countries use to anticipate threats or is it writing up incident reports and calling it a day?

Surely, these are not difficult questions. They are the questions that the 9/11 Commission asked the CIA and the NSA after the worst intelligence failure in American history. They are the questions that Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry asked about British intelligence and Iraq. They are the questions that Israel’s Agranat Commission asked after the Yom Kippur catastrophe. After that particular failure, Mossad went through a fundamental rethink; on strategic accountability, on the balance between human intelligence and signals intelligence, on how its analysis function was structured, on how it projected threats. The FBI similarly overhauled its entire intelligence function after 9/11; standardising analyst training, breaking down information silos between departments, and shifting its entire operational culture from reactive to preventive.

These institutions asked hard questions publicly, took the answers seriously, and came out better on the other side beyond the form.

Across West Africa, including Ghana, these questions are not being asked. Not publicly. Not in any sustained way. Not by anyone with the mandate and the standing to demand honest answers. The result is an intelligence community that has operated for decades without real public accountability for whether it is actually doing its job. Without scrutiny, you do not know what you are missing. And without knowing what you are missing, there is no pressure to fix it.

What Gardner Understood

John Gardner spent his career studying how organisations fail; not spectacularly, not all at once, but slowly and quietly from the inside. His book on self-renewal is not primarily about intelligence services. But it might as well be.

Gardner’s argument is simple and uncomfortable. Institutions drift, not because bad people take over. They drift because the path of least resistance pulls every organisation away from its original purpose and toward whatever is easier, more comfortable, and more convenient for the people running it. The mission statement stays the same. The purpose quietly moves on.

His prescription was renewal not as a one-time event, but as a continuous institutional habit. The regular, deliberate practice of asking: are we still doing what we were built to do? Are we still serving the people we were built to serve? Are we measuring ourselves against the right standards? Without that discipline, drift is not a possibility. It is a guarantee.

Ghana’s intelligence service was built to help the country think. To collect information, analyse it rigorously, and deliver assessed judgment to political leaders before they have to act. That is not an easy mandate. It requires genuine analytical capability, intellectual honesty, serious investments in training, and political leaders who know what good intelligence looks like and hold the service accountable for producing it.

Without public scrutiny, what happens is exactly what Gardner predicted. The field reports pile up. The incident diaries get thicker. The summaries move up the chain and back down again. The work fills the day without necessarily serving the country. And because nobody outside is asking whether the analytical substance is there, nobody inside is under any pressure to provide it.

Ghana has not built the renewal mechanism Gardner describes. The public conversation that would force the institution to examine itself honestly has not happened. Parliamentary oversight has not been rigorous enough to demand real answers. The media and civil society have not treated intelligence as a legitimate subject for scrutiny.

The drift has continued. How far, and for how long, the public record cannot tell us because the absence of scrutiny is, among other things, self-concealing.

Why Nobody Asks

Two things explain the silence, and they are worth separating.

The first is genuine ignorance. A significant number of Ghanaians including educated, engaged Ghanaians genuinely do not know what an intelligence service is supposed to do. When the dominant image of intelligence is surveillance, dark clothing, and vague menace, people have no framework for asking whether the service is performing its analytical function. You cannot demand reform of something you have never been able to describe. And the institution, which benefits from this ignorance, has made no effort to change it.

The second is something older and more deliberate. The intelligence service carries an aura built during Ghana’s revolutionary and military periods, when the consequences of attracting the attention of the security services could be severe and sometimes final. That history is real. Its legacy is also real. Some current and former practitioners have actively maintained this aura long past the political conditions that produced it, because an institution people are afraid of is an institution people do not reform. People walk past the walls carefully and talk about other things.

Both explanations serve the same result. Intelligence reform stays off the agenda while every other reform conversation happens around it.

What Honest Examination Actually Produces

In October 1973, Israel’s intelligence community was caught completely off guard by the joint Egyptian and Syrian attack on Yom Kippur. The failure was not from a lack of information. Israel had intercepts. It had sources. It had seen the military preparations along the Suez Canal. The failure was analytical, a fixed institutional belief, the concept, that Egypt would not attack without air superiority it did not yet have. The concept was so deeply embedded that contradictory evidence was explained away rather than taken seriously. A senior analyst who raised the alarm was overruled.

Israel did not respond to this failure by going quiet. The Agranat Commission examined everything openly, seriously, and without protective instinct toward the institution or the individuals whose judgments had been catastrophically wrong. Careers ended. Hard conclusions were drawn. Structural reforms followed: red teams, mandatory alternative analysis, formal processes for ensuring that dissenting views actually reached decision-makers.

Israel is a genuinely better intelligence community because it subjected its worst failure to honest public examination and then did something real about what it found, beyond the ink on paper.

Pre disaster event led reforms are typically difficult to argue for and obtain funding although preferable to the post event or disaster triggered reforms which comes compelling and mostly at a cost. Some countries have institutionalised reforms as an integrated, continuous, adaptive part of their processes. Ghana has not had its Yom Kippur. That is fortunate. But the absence of a catastrophic failure is not the same as the presence of a functioning institution. It is evidence that the reckoning has not arrived yet.

The public conversation about intelligence reform, the one this country has not been having is what could drive renewal before that reckoning arrives rather than after. And I say this as someone who has been inside the institution and who attempted to start that process from the supply side. I can tell you from experience that it cannot be started, sustained, or made durable from the inside alone. It requires the demand side, the executive branch, to want it. It requires political will that is genuinely bipartisan, because the gaps in our intelligence architecture have accumulated across every administration regardless of party.

We have excellent personnel within these organisations. That is not the question. The question is whether the institution around them is oriented toward the right work, equipped to do it, and held accountable for the results.

That question is not being asked. And the country that has reformed its Electoral Commission, its police service, its judiciary, and its civil service while walking quietly past the walls of the institution that is supposed to help it see what is coming has not finished its reform work.

It has barely started.

By Nana Attobrah Quaicoe Former Director General, Bureau of National Intelligence, Ghana