Democratisation and the Governance of the Security Sector in Ghana: The Case of the Ghana Police Service

Abstract

"This article seeks to achieve a dual purpose. The first is to improve our understanding of the political, economic and social forces that have shaped the Ghana Police Service in the past and continue to influence its shape and form today. The second is to emphasize the negative consequences of a police reform or police good governance agenda that is historical, epiphenomenal and contemporaneous.
It concludes on the note that any serious reform of the Service must not begin with the epiphenomenal and the contemporaneous since the key problems of the Service are deeply embedded in a history that is hardly know, much less understood. Given the peculiar history of the GPS and its resulting character today, only a major re-engineering of the Service will make it capable of submitting to the tenets of good governance."