Kofi Ampeah Woode
The monitoring of Ghana’s maritime domain is set for a short-in-the-arm, with the impending acquisition and installation of a state-of-the-art surveillance system, which includes Over the Horizon Radars, which will enable the Ghana Navy (GN) to see well beyond 200 nautical miles of Ghana’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
The Chief of the Naval Staff (CNS) of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) – Rear Admiral (R/Adm) Issah Adam Yakubu revealed in his address at the 2-day 2024 CNS Annual Conference, which opened on Thursday 22 February 2024, at the Naval Headquarters, Burma Camp, under the theme: “Consolidating the gains made towards achieving the objectives of Ghana Navy’s Agenda 2024”.
The CNS hinted stated that the yet to be installed system will replace Ghana’s Maritime Operations Centre’s (MOC) current Vessel Traffic and Management Information Systems (VTMIS), which was sponsored by the Ghana Maritime Authority (GMA).
Admiral Yakubu said who described the oncoming maritime domain monitoring system as a game-changer, said “Finally, we are about to achieve this essential objective, which has run through all the strategies that our predecessors had developed and worked with”.
He continued to say that the new MOC surveillance system, which would be in place by June 2024, is a higher version of the much-acknowledged ‘Falcon Eye’ surveillance system in use by another West African Navy, which is said to have helped to chalk great successes in their maritime domain.
Since 2021, the CNS said, GN’s 1st Priority Action of its strategic objective, has been to achieve total surveillance coverage of Ghana’s EEZ, and have added some monitoring systems to the ones that existed – some of which were acquired through its own efforts, and others with the support of its partners.
The CNS further revealed that a team from the GMA – which is sponsoring the acquisition of new system, in the company of GN’s Director Technical and Director Naval Intelligence, travelled to Serbia for factory acceptance trials (FAT), and have returned with a favourable report on how well the trials went, and that the equipment will soon be shipped to Ghana for installation in June.
He expressed excitement that the GN is finally able to attain total surveillance coverage of Ghana’s EEZ – a significant aspiration of the Navy’s forebears, from about 10 years ago, which has always been considered as a strategic priority, of the nation’s Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) capability.
By Kofi Ampeah-Woode
