[The United States claims that its military presence on the
African continent has to do with its counterterrorism campaign and
aims to prevent the entry of China into this region.]
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WHY DOES THE UNITED STATES HAVE A MILITARY BASE IN GHANA?  
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Vijay Prashad
June 17, 2022
CounterPunch
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_ The United States claims that its military presence on the African
continent has to do with its counterterrorism campaign and aims to
prevent the entry of China into this region. _

the U.S. military can use the Accra airport without any regulations
or checks, with U.S. military aircraft being “free from boarding and
inspection” , AFP

 

In April 2018, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa
Akufo-Addo, said
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Ghana has “not offered a military base, and will not offer a
military base to the United States of America.” His comments came
after Ghana’s parliament had ratified a new defense cooperation
agreement
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the United States on March 28, 2018, which was finally signed
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May 2018. During a televised discussion, soon after the agreement was
formalized in March 2018, Ghana’s Minister of Defense Dominic
Nitiwul told Kwesi Pratt Jr., a journalist and leader of the Socialist
Movement of Ghana, that Ghana had not entered into a military
agreement with the United States. Pratt, however, said
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the military agreement was a “source of worry” and was “a
surrender of our [Ghanaian] sovereignty.”

In 2021, the research institute of Pratt’s Socialist Movement
produced—along with the Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research—a dossier
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the French and U.S. military presence in Africa. That
dossier—“Defending Our Sovereignty: U.S. Military Bases in Africa
and the Future of African Unity”—noted that the United States has
now established the West Africa Logistics Network
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at Kotoka International Airport in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In
2019, then-U.S. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said
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a weekly U.S. flight from Germany to Accra was “basically a bus
route.” The WALN is a cooperative security location, which is
another name for a U.S. military base.

Now, four years later after the signing of the defense cooperation
agreement, I spoke with Kwesi Pratt and asked him about the state of
this deal and the consequences of the presence of the U.S. base on
Ghanaian soil. The WALN, Pratt told me, has now taken over one of the
three terminals at the airport in Accra, and at this terminal,
“hundreds of U.S. soldiers have been seen arriving and leaving. It
is suspected that they may be involved in some operational activities
in other West African countries and generally across the Sahel.”

U.S. SOLDIERS DON’T NEED PASSPORTS

A glance at the U.S.-Ghana defense agreement raises many questions.
Article 12 of the agreement states
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the U.S. military can use the Accra airport without any
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or checks, with U.S. military aircraft being “free from boarding and
inspection
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and the Ghanaian government providing “unimpeded access to and use
of [a]greed facilities and areas to United States forces.” Pratt
told me that this agreement allows U.S. soldiers “far more
privileges than those prescribed in the Vienna Convention
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diplomats. They do not need passports to enter Ghana. All they need is
their U.S. Army identity cards. They don’t even require visas to
enter Ghana. They are not subject to customs or any other
inspection.”

Ghana has allowed the United States armed forces “to use Ghanaian
radio frequencies for free,” Pratt said. But the most stunning fact
about this arrangement is that, he said, “If U.S. soldiers kill
Ghanaians and destroy their properties, the U.S. soldiers cannot be
tried in Ghana. Ghanaians cannot sue U.S. soldiers or the U.S.
government for compensation if and when their relatives are killed, or
their properties are destroyed by the U.S. Army or soldiers.”

WHY WOULD GHANA ALLOW THIS?

The U.S.-Ghana agreement permits this disregard for Ghana’s
sovereignty. Pratt told me that the political ideology of the Ghanaian
government that is in power now has been to adhere to a long history
of appeasement toward the demands made by colonial and Western states,
beginning with Britain—which was the colonial power that ruled over
the Gold Coast (the former name for Ghana) until
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leading up to providing “unimpeded access” to the United States
troops under the defense deal.

The current president of Ghana, Akufo-Addo, comes from the political
ideology that the former prime minister of Ghana (1969-1972) Kofi
Abrefa Busia also conformed to. In the early 1950s, Pratt told me,
those following this ideology “dispatched a delegation to the United
Kingdom to persuade the authorities that it was too early to grant
independence to the Gold Coast.” This led to a coup in Ghana, where
those supporting this ideology “collaborated with the Central
Intelligence Agency to overthrow the [then-President of Ghana] Kwame
Nkrumah government on February 24, 1966, and resisted [imposing]
sanctions against the South African apartheid regime in 1969,” Pratt
said. The current government, Pratt added, will do anything to please
the United States government and its allies.

WHY IS THE UNITED STATES INTERESTED IN GHANA?

The United States claims that its military presence on the African
continent has to do with its counterterrorism
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and aims to prevent the entry of China into this region. “There is
no Chinese military presence in Ghana,” Pratt told me, and indeed
the idea of Chinese presence is being used
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the United States to deepen its military control over the continent
for more prosaic reasons.

In 2001, then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy
Policy Development Group published the National Energy Policy
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The contents of this report show, Pratt told me, that the United
States understood that it could “no longer rely on the Middle East
for its energy supplies. A shift to West Africa for [meeting the] U.S.
energy needs is imperative.” Apart from West Africa’s energy
resources, Ghana “has huge national resources. It is currently the
largest producer of gold in Africa and… [is among the top 10
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of gold in the world. It is the second-largest producer
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cocoa in the world. It has iron, diamond, manganese, bauxite, oil and
gas, lithium, and abundant water resources, including the largest
man-made lake in the world.” Apart from these resources, Ghana’s
location on the equator makes it valuable for agricultural
development, and its large bank of highly educated English-speaking
professionals makes it valuable for meeting the demands of the
West’s service sector.

Apart from these economic issues, Pratt said, the United States
government has intervened in Ghana—including in the coup of
1966—to prevent it from having a leadership role in the
decolonization process in Africa. More recently, the United States has
found Ghana to be a reliable ally in its various military and
commercial projects across the continent. It is toward those projects,
and not the national interest of the Ghanaian people, Pratt said, that
the United States has now built its base in a part of Accra’s
civilian airport.

_This article was produced by __Globetrotter_
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_VIJAY PRASHAD’S most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The
Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US
Power (New Press, August 2022)._

COUNTERPUNCH is reader supported! Please help keep us alive
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