National Security Advisor Brigadier-General Mensah Nunoo says dereliction of duty at the local level could be blamed for the escalation of the feud between the Techiman and Tuobodom chiefs. He said the fracas could have been controlled if security personnel in Tuobodom and Techiman had managed the situation effectively at the on-set. The National Security Advisor is leading a delegation to Techiman to meet with the Techiman chief, Osabarima Akumfi Ameyaw, as part of efforts to deescalate the tensions that were precipitated by the kidnapping and subsequent torture of the Omanhene of Tuobodom, Nana Baffour Asare II, at the palace of the Techimanhene. The delegation met with the Asantehene Tuesday evening on the subject. Following the incident, the Asantehene – to whom the Tuobodom chief owes allegiance – called for the dismissal of the Brong Ahafo Regional Police Commander and the Regional Minister for exhibiting incompetence and allowing the issue to fester. Otumfuo Osei Tutu II was particularly infuriated by reports that the Techiman chief brazenly boasted that his party – the ruling National Democratic Congress - was in power and that he connections and was therefore not amenable to any laws regardless whatever crimes he committed. This, Brig. Gen. Nunoo-Mensah believes is precisely the dangerous path the country was threading, noting that at the end of the meeting, it was obvious that the Otumfuo was not necessarily angry because “he is a man of peace, [and] wants development in Ashanti and in Ghana in general.” “[With] the allegation that a chief says ‘my party is now in power’ and so on. Now when a party is in power, the government formed is a government of all the people not a government of the members of that party, all these are hampering the work of the security people,” he said. Continuing, the security chief said, “you have people in the security services – the police, the army some are saying ‘he is a party man’, ‘he is not a party man,’ that shouldn’t happen, that shouldn’t be the case, but unfortunately we are in that kind of situation which we have to find a solution to.” The National Security Adviser also indicated that he alone cannot fix the overly-politicised nature of the country’s security services. He said while he was doing the best he could, he, just as one tree cannot make a forest, could not possibly change the situation in the country, stressing the need for all Ghanaians and opinion leaders to recognise that each has a role to play to make the nation a peaceful place. “We’ve become very political, chiefs are political, the police are political, everybody is political, that makes the life of everybody very difficult. As a policeman, your loyalty is to the state, as a military man your loyalty is to the state but we have a situation where you have party people in the military, party people in the police, party people everywhere. We need to depoliticise the institutions of state,” he state. Speaking to Joy FM’s Super Morning Show host Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah on the escalation of tensions between Asanteman and Bonoman councils, Brig. Gen. Nunoo-Mensah expressed regret that the security services had been dangerously polarised along partisan lines. He said there has been dereliction duty on the part of many leading to the situation which was completely avoidable. “This situation we are in, in Tuobodom shouldn’t have reached where it is at the moment, it should have been dealt with quite rapidly within the locality.” He promised that whoever is found to be culpable in case will be dealt according to the law but stressed the need for concerted effort on the part of all Ghanaians to reverse the current trend where every issue has political colouration. “People are not doing their work and this is the biggest problem we face at the moment and also you’ve got so much politics as I said earlier, in what we do so that if something happen [people just] say this is not our man, this is not our party man. This shouldn’t be the case! If you go wrong, the law shouldn’t have any business in saying that ‘this man is not one of us’, he is one of us so the law shouldn’t deal with the person, the law should deal with everybody,” he emphasised. Story by Malik Abass Daabu/Myjoyonline.com/Ghana