The latest terrorist attacks in West Africa have turned the world’s attention to conflict-prone and fragile sub-Saharan Africa.
Deadly violence in Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire show that the sub-region is not safe, Ghana inclusive. Now, threats that Ghana is the next target of the Islamised purveyors of death are having a slow-down effect on the economy.
The March 13 attack on the L’Etoile du Sud in the Ivorian coastal town of Grand Bassam, about 40 kilometres east of the country’s economic capital, Abidjan, led to the death of 16 people, mostly civilians and several foreign nationals.
The dreadful attack was orchestrated by Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). Before that attack, similar deadly AQIM bombardments of a hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, in January; and the Malian capital, Bamako, last November, had killed about 30 and 20 people respectively.
After the January offensive, France had warned Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire that they were the next targets on AQIM’s hit list, according to intelligence gleaned from wire-taps. Both countries beefed up security at borders and in the major cities, especially at locations where foreigners are likely to congregate. Thus, the United States (US) advised its citizens in Abidjan and Dakar, Senegal’s capital city, to avoid tourist hubs.
Lately, the Ghanaian media is saturated with news reports and expert analyses that imminent terrorist attacks in West African second largest economy are real. Well-known Nigerian Christian cleric T. B. Joshua’s recent prophesy heightened national security, prompting pre-emptive measures. But Prophet Joshua’s nebulous timelines came and went without something untoward happening to Ghana.
Yet according to reports, a man believed to be the mastermind behind the Grand Bassam attacks had reportedly confirmed an attack on Ghana and Togo. This was revealed in a security alert dated April 9, and circulated to the various security agencies by Ghana’s National Security Council.
According to the alert, the suspect, a Malian, confessed his intentions during an interrogation by the Ivorian security agencies after he was captured for alleged acts of terrorism. The alert said Ghana and Togo were the next targets after the attacks in Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire, adding that the choice of Ghana is to take away the perception that only francophone countries are the target.
“Intelligence gathered by the National Security Council (NSCS) indicates a possible terrorist attack on the country is real,” the alert said. The Ivorian security agencies investigating the attack on the Grand Bassam gathered that the terrorists “mode of entry into countries with their explosives and weapons is through concealment.”
“They enter through approved and unapproved entry points. In the Ivorian attacks they reportedly entered from Mali using Niger registered 4×4 vehicle. They reportedly concealed their weapons and grenade in the vehicles compartment for spare tyres, padded with cushions and bubbled wraps to keep them stable and prevent noise.”
Extra vigilance required
Following the real-and-present threat of the attack based on the information from Cote d’Ivoire; Ghana’s National Security has directed all controls, especially the northern borders with Burkina Faso, to be extra vigilant. The country asked its citizens to be vigilant and security-conscious in the face of potential terror attacks in the country.
National security issued a terror alert warning Ghanaians to be wary of a “credible” threat of attacks in Ghana. Dr Benjamin Kunbour and Prosper Bani, Ministers of Defence and the Interior respectively, advised Ghanaians on what to do in an event of terror attack in Ghana.
Dr Kunbour says having studied the pattern of attacks in neighbouring Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire, it has become manifest that the danger zones are not security installations but rather public places including hotels, restaurants, malls and other public places that attract a lot of foreigners. According to him, the attackers typically target places where there will be an obstruction from the public which will slow down the rate of response from the security personnel.
The Defence Minister assures that the security agencies are “getting hospitality industry operators to scale up internal security and make it easier for security to deploy men in times of the attack.”
Dr Kunbour is not enthused with the Ghanaian habit of divulging voluntarily all kinds of information to strangers without probing further to find out why those strangers are seeking that information. “People need to be cautious by not giving out information to strangers. In other places you cannot go asking people to give you information just like that. But in Ghana people can even charter a taxi and take strangers to places or people they are looking for,” he states.
Bani tells journalists in Accra that deliberate and specific instructions have been given to hotel and restaurant managers on what to do in the event of an attack. He adds the security apparatus have deliberately decided not to put that information in the public domain in order not to give their security strategies away to potential attackers.
Bani admits it would be difficult to prevent any such attacks, but entreated Ghanaians to report suspicious characters to the police as a way of averting such attacks.
The estimated number of deaths from terrorism worldwide rose from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014, according to a November 2015 analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace. The vast majority of lives lost to terrorism in 2014 – 78 per cent – took place in the five countries where most terrorism activities occurred: Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. More than half of incidents claimed were attributed to Boko Haram and the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL).
However, 93 countries experienced, at least, one terrorist event in 2014, including France, Australia and Austria. Commentators have frequently speculated about the nature and characteristics of terrorism, including the role of technology and social media in perpetrating terrorist acts. Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been a great deal of discussion about the root causes of terrorist violence, but fewer rigorous empirical assessments have been attempted.
For the link between economic growth and terrorism, the existing evidence is inconclusive. Some authors claim there is a positive link; others suggest there is an inverse association; and some have found no statistically significant relationship. Some of the latest evidence in this debate comes from a 2015 study published in Oxford Economic Papers titled ‘Economic Growth and Terrorism: Domestic, International and Suicide,” which is based on a cross-national and time-series data analysis of 127 countries for 1970-2007. Data measuring terrorism violence is from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD).
Income inequality…state failure
Seung-Whan Choi, an author and a faculty member of the University of Illinois, Chicago, notes that controls for a number of variables such as income inequality, democracy, state failure, population and a variable designating post-Cold War conditions. Higher industrial economic growth is associated with lower levels of international and domestic terrorist violence.
It appears that if industrial growth increases by one per cent, the percentage change in the incidence rate of domestic terrorism is a one per cent decrease, while holding the other variables constant; for the incidence rate of international terrorism, there is a one per cent decrease. Conversely, a higher level of industrial economic growth is associated with higher levels of suicide attacks. Specifically, if a country were to increase its industrial growth by one per cent, its relative change in the expected number of suicide terrorism would be expected to increase by two per cent, while holding all other variables in the model constant.
The emergency of the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria depended on the youth who are mostly not employed. This makes them prone to the militia group’s recruitment. Though West Africa’s demographics can represent an opportunity for increased productivity and economic growth – enabled by a large, young and healthy workforce and a relatively small dependent population – the tendency has been to view the restless mass unemployed youth as a ticking time-bomb. In fact, though youth unemployment may be a factor of violence, it is rarely a main or direct cause.
The direct causal link between youth unemployment and violence has been debunked. The relationship between unemployment and violence is multi-faceted and complex. A focus on unemployment is problematic in that it treats youth as an undifferentiated mass. The focus also assumes that the mismatch between employment aspirations and reality is a catalyst for youth violence. The warranted terrorist attacks, according to economists, have negatively affected the movement of capital as well as businesses within the sub-region.
Negative impacts on investments
Terrorists create an atmosphere of fear, intimidation and heightened financial risk. To this end, the activities of terrorists may have negative impact on investments through several means. And this is happening to the Ghanaian economy. The activities of terrorists lead to loss in tourist revenue when tourists begin to perceive a country as not too safe for vacation. It also impacts negatively on foreign direct investments as foreigners decide to look for safer destinations for their investments, Dr RazielObeng-Okon, a renowned economist, explains in a GB&F interview.
The terrorists attack may also destroy the infrastructure of a country, and thereby, cause economic disruption. The resources used in protecting or deterring the presence of terrorists have an opportunity cost because it could be used in other productive sectors of the economy. There are various studies which support the negative impact of terrorism on investment.
According to a study conducted in Punjab in India, terrorism had significant negative effects on the level of investment in long-term agricultural technology, but the effects are small and insignificant for short-term investment.
The study showed that the presence of a major terrorist incident in a district in a year had the potential of reducing long-term fixed investment by about 17 per cent. In another study conducted by Dr KhusravGaibulloev, Assistant Professor of Economics at the American University of Sharjah, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Todd Sander, Executive Director of the Centre for Digital Government at e.Republic , a California-based organisation on selected Asian countries, revealed that transnational terrorists attacks had a significant growth-limiting effect by crowding in government expenditure and reducing per capita growth by about 1.5 per cent.
In a related study, terrorist risk was associated with a fall in net foreign direct investment position of about five per cent of GDP. Using 160 countries from 1970 to 2007, Daniel Meierrieks and Thomas Gries of University of Paderborn showed that terrorism was found to be detrimental to the growth of African and Islamic countries, with low levels of political openness, high levels of political instability and strong terrorist activity.
Terrorist risk management
In terms of capacity to manage terrorist risk, developed countries are better placed to absorb terrorism without displaying adverse economic consequences unlike developing countries where resources to fight terrorism are usually limited.
The negative impact of terrorism on bilateral and multilateral trade is pronounced only in the medium term usually more than one and a half years after an attack/incident. The short-term impact of international terror on trade appears to be very small, if not negligible.
This means that terrorist risk management must be an on-going process for countries and companies. Dr Obeng-Okon adds that with the increased threat of global terrorism, public, private and governmental agencies face an increased need to understand and manage the risk to their employees and organisational assets.
Managing risk associated with the threat of terrorism can be a daunting task for both governments and companies. Some of the most common questions include how to begin a terrorism risk management programme, what assets should be protected and what are the most effective mitigation solutions. Similar to managing the risk from other hazards, a terrorism risk management programme should provide a logical and systematic framework for identifying and dealing with potential terrorist threats, according to Dr Obeng-Okon.
The 2015 report from the Institute for Economics and Peace suggests that because there are high levels of internal conflict in many of the countries where terrorism is concentrated, it is tough to separate the impact of terrorism on economies from the economic effects of the conflict. A 2014 report from the Institute found that “there is no systematic link to poverty measures, or to several broader economic development factors such as the Human Development Index or its sub-components such as mean years of schooling, or life expectancy.”
Further, a 2013 study published in the Journal of Peace Research, ‘Causality between Terrorism and Economic Growth’ examines how terrorism can affect economic growth.
The study finds, among other things, that “for the post–Cold War era, terrorism is found to be detrimental to growth for African and Islamic countries with low levels of political openness, high levels of political instability, and strong terrorist activity.”
In terms of negative impact, it is important to emphasise that many studies have shown that internal conflicts and wars are worse than transnational terrorism. Indeed, an internal conflict has the greatest growth concern, more than twice that of transnational terrorism.
To this end, Dr Obeng-Okon, who lectures Public Accounting at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), advises that developing countries must allocate more resources in fighting and curbing internal conflicts and wars which weigh heavily on the growth of their economies. “It is good to be sensitive to transnational terrorism but it is even more important to find lasting solutions to pockets of tribal conflicts and wars in Africa,” he states.
Like transnational terrorism, internal wars have devastating effects on crowding in on government expenditure, loss of tourism revenue, reduction of foreign direct investments, destroying of basic infrastructure and disrupting economic activities.
Underdeveloped due to prolonged internal conflicts
A number of countries in Africa are underdeveloped due to prolonged internal conflicts and wars arising from ethnic and religious differences. While the discussion on terrorism has gained prominence in Ghana today, the government must endeavour not to be seen taking side in the world of terrorism to avoid becoming a target nation for any terrorist group.
The acceptance of the two ex- Guantanamo Bay detainees without resort to Parliamentary or popular approval is a faux pas that must not be repeated. Experts vouch that Ghana and Togo must beef up their security 24/7. It is important to note that internal conflicts and wars have even more serious consequences on the social, political and economic progress of a country than internal and external terrorism. The two Anglophone and Francophone countries must do everything possible to curb the incidences of pockets of ethnic conflicts within them because studies show that the negative impact of internal wars is more than twice that of transnational terrorism.
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh, GB&F
