Ghana Must Weigh Its Options Carefully on EU Defence Pact, MP Says 

In an exclusive interview with Global South Media, Member of Parliament Hon. Collins Adamako Mensah delivered a pointed warning about the proposed military defence agreement between Ghana and the European Union, drawing a direct line between the current volatility in the Gulf and the risks Ghana would face by binding itself militarily to outside powers. He argued that escalating conflict among a handful of Gulf states has already dragged in nations whose only fault was holding a defence cooperation agreement with one of the parties involved, and cautioned that Ghana could find itself pulled into a war it had no part in starting simply by virtue of the fine print in a document signed years earlier. His central demand was transparency, insisting that the full content of any agreement with the EU be made public and scrutinised openly rather than negotiated quietly and presented to Ghanaians as a fait accompli.

Pressed on how such an agreement could affect national sovereignty, the MP was equally direct, explaining that sovereignty is not lost in the signing of an agreement itself but in the terms buried within it. He offered a concrete illustration, warning that provisions granting foreign parties unscreened access to Ghana’s airports, VIP lounges or airspace, bypassing the protocols an ordinary citizen or even government official would be subject to, would represent a real and measurable surrender of state authority. For Hon. Mensah, the test is not whether Ghana engages with the EU on defence matters at all, but whether the country’s negotiators hold the line on terms that preserve rather than dilute the nation’s control over its own territory and institutions.

On the question of ratification, the MP walked through the constitutional safeguard that requires any agreement with an international organisation to pass through Parliament, describing it as the mechanism through which the Ghanaian people, represented by their elected members, get a say in decisions made in their name. He was candid, however, about the practical limits of that safeguard in a Parliament where the governing side holds a supermajority, predicting that a deal the executive has already negotiated and is determined to pass will likely clear the House regardless of objections raised by the minority or even by dissenting government backbenchers. Still, he pointed to public hearings and constituency consultations, including his own practice of returning to cocoa farming constituents on matters affecting their livelihoods, as channels through which grassroots opinion can shape the record even when it cannot always change the outcome, underscoring his broader call for Ghana to weigh any military entanglement with the EU carefully before signing away flexibility it may one day need back.