REJOINDER: Intelligence Is Not Simply What The Former Director-General BNI Says It Is
The article, “The Difference Between Knowing and Seeing: Why Intelligence Services in Africa Are Still Fighting the Last War,” raises questions about the quality of intelligence analysis and the need for intelligence organisations to provide decision-makers with timely assessments of emerging threats. That objective is not controversial. What is problematic is the conceptual framework through which the former Director-General arrives at his conclusions and, more importantly, the sweeping judgements he makes about the professional competence and orientation of Ghana’s intelligence services.
The first problem is the failure to adequately distinguish intelligence from counterintelligence. Mark Lowenthal defines intelligence broadly as a process involving the identification of national security information requirements, collection, processing, analysis and dissemination, while counterintelligence safeguards those processes and information. His treatment of counterintelligence also demonstrates why it cannot be neatly confined to a single functional box. Counterintelligence involves collection, defensive and offensive activities and intersects with human intelligence, analysis, security and law enforcement.
This distinction matters enormously in the Ghanaian context. Under Ghana’s Security and Intelligence Agencies Acts, from 1996 through 2020 and now 2026, the Internal Intelligence Agency is expressly responsible not only for counterintelligence and internal security but also for intelligence relating to violent extremism and terrorism, organized crime and other criminal activity, as well as investigations conducted in collaboration with other security agencies into serious offences and matters of national importance. It is therefore intellectually unsound to present criminal investigation (which the author erroneously called criminal intelligence), security intelligence and counterintelligence as if they occupy three sealed compartments. Both strategic intelligence and counterintelligence are two sides of the same coin known as security intelligence.
It must be stressed that Ghana’s Security and Intelligence Agencies’ Act denotes the Research Department (RD) and the Bureau of National Intelligence (BNI) as the only intelligence agencies of Ghana. The author’s reference to the Defence Intelligence (DI) and Police Intelligence (PI) as intelligence agencies is, therefore, flawed. The DI and PI are departments with specific mandates of providing intelligence to support the works of their respective agencies, just as the Ghana Immigration Service has also got an intelligence department supporting its work. This is a normal practice in advanced countries.
Counterintelligence is notoriously difficult to demarcate precisely because its functions overlap with intelligence collection, security protection, criminal investigations, counterterrorism and other national security activities. The academic literature recognizes this difficulty. Paul Redmond, writing in The Oxford Handbook of National Security Intelligence, describes counterintelligence in terms of identifying, deceiving, exploiting, disrupting and protecting against espionage and other intelligence activities. The literature on intelligence and law enforcement similarly recognizes that the two are distinct but substantially overlapping domains. This is why, for instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States of America (USA) would collaborate with or take over certain criminal investigations from other federal state law enforcement agencies when the need arises.
The second problem is the article’s characterization of the Bureau as essentially a “criminal intelligence” organization engaged in mere collection and recording of incidents and that has failed to become a genuine national security intelligence service.
That assertion requires considerably more evidence than the author provides. The Bureau’s work cannot reasonably be assessed from the visibility of its reports to an outsider. Much of counterintelligence and internal intelligence is deliberately invisible. Successful counterintelligence frequently produces no public event because its objective is to detect, neutralize, disrupt or prevent an adversary’s activity before it becomes visible. The absence of a visible outcome is not evidence of the absence of intelligence activity.
Additionally, there is sufficient evidence that the Bureau has lived up to its mandate as far as collecting, collating, analyzing, and disseminating intelligence to the policy-maker is concerned. If the policy-maker fails to act on the early-warning advice provided by the Bureau, that cannot be considered a deficiency of the intelligence service. From the 1966 and 1972 coup d’états through the 1993/4 and 2002 conflicts in the north to the Western Togoland Restoration Front’s attack of 2020, the Bureau always analysed information on impending national security breaches and provided forward-looking insights, but the policy-maker failed to act on the judgement delivered. In the 1972 coup for instance, as Kofi Bentum Quantson related in his book “National Security: The Dilemma”, the Busia government dismissed the intelligence advice on the coup plot based on their naïve belief that an Akan cannot overthrow an Akan Prime Minister. In the 1993/4 Konkomba-Nanumba war and 2002 Dagbon crisis, the Bureau provided sufficient intelligence over a considerable time pointing to the imminent conflicts, yet the policy-maker sat on it until the conflicts broke out. Again, in the 2020 incident, intelligence advice was provided, the government of the day failed to act.
Another crucial point to note is the trend of different political traditions responding differently to intelligence insights provided by the Bureau. This is evident in the previous New Patriotic Party(NPP) government’s handling of the Western Togoland issue. Right after the 1956 plebiscite, the colonial administration as well as various post-independence governments have contained the group, acting on intelligence assessments of the Bureau, but the group invariably becomes uncontainable when the NPP, the author’s political tradition, is in power. This, clearly, is not failure on the part of the intelligence service.
The third problem concerns professional authority. The author writes as a former Director-General and therefore speaks with the authority of someone presumed to possess intimate knowledge of the organisation. Yet his public assessment invites an obvious question: if the deficiencies he identifies were as fundamental and pervasive as he now suggests, what corrective measures did he initiate during his own 2-year tenure?
This question is particularly relevant because the author was not a career intelligence officer before becoming Director-General. His experience at the apex of an intelligence organisation should not automatically be equated with the accumulated professional experience of officers who spent their careers collecting intelligence, conducting counterintelligence operations, managing sources, investigating security threats and working within the institutional doctrine of the Bureau.
There is also a professional irony in publicly criticising the competence and intellectual quality of serving intelligence personnel after having been responsible for their leadership.
During his tenure, there were also concerns among officers about an apparent “they versus us” approach to professional relationships, reportedly reflected in the recurring question, “ɔka yɛ ho?”
— “is he or she one of us?” If such concerns are accurate, they raise a legitimate question about whether the very culture now being criticised was not, at least in part, reinforced by the leadership philosophy of the period.
An intelligence organisation cannot develop professional analytical capacity by sidelining experienced officers in favour of individuals whose principal qualification is perceived political affinity or personal loyalty. If the former Director-General wishes to make the quality of Ghanaian intelligence personnel a subject of public debate, he must also be prepared to subject his own leadership decisions to the same scrutiny. If he chooses to surround himself with inexperienced officers who cannot produce useful intelligence products and he cannot also analyse the reports and produce forward-looking assessments from them, then the supposed empty reports he submits to the policy-maker rests squarely on him as the highest official of the organization. He cannot blame a system that has worked for his predecessors for ages and is still working for his successor who was his administrator. How then did or do they handle the system such that they could rely on it but he could not use the same system effectively during his tenure as the head? The article is therefore useful as a call for stronger intelligence analysis. It is much less convincing as a comprehensive diagnosis of the Bureau.
It must also be emphasized that what is most associated with his tenure was the drive for political power maximisation. It is not new for the Bureau to make estimates of which party wins a constituency during an election year, but never has that been given prominence as witnessed under his watch. During that period, district officers were sidelined and officers perceived as loyalists were carefully selected with a huge budget above all other operations and prioritised to go round the country, with a Kobo collect App, just to assess the chances of the NPP. That was his priority, and that is what he is associated with in the minds of the Bureau’s operatives. If that was the demand of his political masters or consumer and is prioritized above galamsey operations that were destroying livelihoods and the environment for Ghanaians, how does this same person turn around to question the system that has produced volumes on galamsey activities, with some actors even daring to mention known party activists associated with the NPP?
One cannot say that the intelligence/national security architecture is perfect in Ghana. However, what the writer pointed out as the challenges confronting the BNI are far from reality. The realities he categorizes as the demand side to be written about later should have been the first, since it is based on demand that goods are supplied. To begin with, the colonial administration’s demand for political intelligence has never been reviewed and revoked, hence it remains in the Bureau’s collection list. Second, Ghana does not have what is known in the advanced countries as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework that seeks to prioritize threats according to the consumer’s preferences. Under such circumstances, the intelligence agencies are left with no choice but to continue collection from the last known collection demands even if they appear obsolete. Therefore, one cannot condemn the supplier when the consumer has not made their demands known. Third is the over politicization of the BNI, from the recruitment of new personnel to the appointment of commanders to the DG.
Intelligence is not simply the ability to predict the future. Nor is an intelligence report rendered inferior because it records an incident. Incident reporting can constitute the raw material from which strategic assessments, threat indicators, patterns and warnings are developed. Analysis without reliable collection is speculation. Collection without analysis is incomplete intelligence. Counterintelligence, meanwhile, cuts across both because it seeks to protect the intelligence enterprise while identifying, understanding and neutralizing hostile intelligence activity.
The proper debate, therefore, should not be whether the Bureau “files” or “thinks”. It should be whether its collection, counterintelligence, investigative, analytical and dissemination functions collectively satisfy Ghana’s national security requirements. That is a much more serious question, and it deserves an answer based on intelligence doctrine, professional experience and evidence rather than sweeping declarations about an institution that the author himself led.
Source: Oko Tetteh – Researcher and Intelligence Analyst