The National Security Secretariat is on a full-scale investigation to trace and track the whereabouts of several consignments of live rounds of ammunition belonging to the Ghana Armed Forces (GFA) which cannot be accounted for.
The said consignment of thousands of military-grade ammunition is suspected to have been covertly transferred to the Secretariat in 2024 without the requisite documentation and in a breach of laid down protocols for such transfers and movement of Ghana Armed Forces ammunition.
Defence Minister, Dr. Edward Omane Boamah told Military Chiefs and journalists in Accra that the incident of the missing consignment is not a clerical error or an inventory mismatch but rather “a deliberate and deeply troubling movement of live rounds without institutional accountability.”
“The reality is that till date, those ammunitions have not been accounted for. How the Ghana Armed Forces could transfer ammunitions to National Security that does not have a fighting Force in 2024 is a question that would definitely have to be answered.
“The Ghana Armed Forces has passed it on to the National Security Secretariat to investigate it since they were the recipients of the ammunitions but what we are doing is that under our watchful eyes, any such incidents would not be dealt with like the way it was handled in the past”, Dr. Omane Boamah noted on Monday, July 21, 2025, during a briefing at the Government Accountability Series, where he spoke on the state of national security.
The Defence Minister continued: “So while we have encircled this and handed this over to National Security to handle, whatever would fall within our domain, trust that we would deal with it the way the military knows best.”
Dr. Omane Boamah was however certain that the country has been safe despite the missing consignment: “We have kept our nation safe and stable, notwithstanding the irregular transfer of thousands of rounds of military ammunition in 2024 from the Ghana Armed Forces to the National Security outfit ammunition, which has since not been accounted for,”
COP Abdul Osman Razak
National Security Coordinator COP Abdul Osman Razak is leading the probe into the whereabouts of the ammunition and he is on record to have said the John Mahama led Administration “will not shield any individual or entity found complicit.”
COP Osman Razak has the reputation of being a ‘no-nonsense’ and action oriented police officer with little or no patience for unnecessary distractions or delays. It is therefore not unexpected of him to have said the probe he leads would be conducted without fear or favour, affection or ill-will and no culprit would be shielded no matter not politically incontinent it would be.
Key focus of the COP Osaman Razak led-investigation includes but not limited to establish certainty on the origin and authorization of the transfer of the ammunition in question, establish with verifiable facts details and nature of possible breaches in chain-of-custody protocols, establish the exact volume and type of ammunition involved, establish beyond doubt the intended recipients and usage purpose and establish the current whereabouts of the consignment.
