[News] Why does the United States have a military base in Ghana?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

peoplesdispatch.org
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/06/15/why-does-the-united-states-have-a-military-base-in-ghana/>
Why does the United States have a military base in Ghana?
Vijay Prashad - June 15, 2022
------------------------------

In April 2018, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said
<https://presidency.gov.gh/index.php/briefing-room/news-style-2/597-no-us-military-base-in-ghana-president-akufo-addo>
that 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
<https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/18-531-Ghana-Defense-Status-of-Forces.pdf>
with the United States on March 28, 2018, which was finally signed
<https://www.state.gov/18-531/> in 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
<https://www.pulse.com.gh/news/politics/disagreement-kwesi-pratt-defense-minister-in-near-fight-over-us-military-base-in/lkj0w5y>
that 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 <https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-42-militarisation-africa/>
on the French and US military presence in Africa. That dossier—“Defending
Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African
Unity”—noted that the United States has now established the West Africa
Logistics Network
<https://www.afsbeurope.army.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002072141/> (WALN) at
Kotoka International Airport in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In 2019,
then-US Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said
<https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2019/02/africom-adds-logistics-hub-west-africa-hinting-enduring-us-presence/155015/>
that a weekly US flight from Germany to Accra was “basically a bus route.”
The WALN is a cooperative security location, which is another name for a US
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 US 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 US 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.”
*US soldiers don’t need passports*

A glance at the US–Ghana defense agreement raises many questions. Article
12 of the agreement states
<https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/18-531-Ghana-Defense-Status-of-Forces.pdf>
that the US military can use the Accra airport without any
<https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/262921-ghanas-parliament-ratifies-deal-granting-unimpeded-access-to-u-s-troops.html>
regulations or checks, with US military aircraft being “free from boarding
and inspection
<https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/18-531-Ghana-Defense-Status-of-Forces.pdf>”
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 US soldiers “far more privileges than those
prescribed in the Vienna Convention
<https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=III-3&chapter=3&clang=_en>
for diplomats. They do not need passports to enter Ghana. All they need is
their US 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 US soldiers kill Ghanaians and destroy
their properties, the US soldiers cannot be tried in Ghana. Ghanaians
cannot sue US soldiers or the US government for compensation if and when
their relatives are killed, or their properties are destroyed by the US
Army or soldiers.”
*Why would Ghana allow this?*

The US–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
<https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1254193.shtml> 1957—and 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
<https://www.csis.org/analysis/defending-us-military-presence-africa-reasons-beyond-counterterrorism>
campaign 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
<https://twitter.com/NoColdWar/status/1533877434176749574> by the United
States to deepen its military control over the continent for more prosaic
reasons.

In 2001, then-US Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy
Development Group published the National Energy Policy
<https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0428/ML042800056.pdf>. 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] US 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
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/06/23/updated-top-10-gold-producing-countries/?sh=2a127b072ce2>
producers] of gold in the world. It is the second-largest producer
<https://www.worldatlas.com/industries/the-top-cocoa-producing-countries-in-the-world.html>
of 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.

*Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of
LeftWord Books <https://mayday.leftword.com/> and the director of
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>. He is a senior non-resident fellow at
Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies <https://tinyurl.com/y2hdjcpo>,
Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including
The Darker Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20>
and The Poorer Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20>.
His latest book is Washington Bullets
<https://mayday.leftword.com/catalog/product/view/id/21820>, with an
introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.*

*This article was produced by Globetrotter <https://globetrotter.media/>.*
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