A leading safety practitioner has called for a multi-agency approach to crowd management in Ghana following the latest fatal stampede at the El-Wak Sports Stadium, warning that lessons from a similar 2020 tragedy have yet to be implemented.
Speaking on The Forum on Asaase Radio on Saturday (16 November), Ed Andrews, a Chartered Safety Practitioner, said the military should not be left to manage large civilian crowds alone, adding that recruitment exercises involving tens of thousands of applicants require coordination with police, prisons, and other security bodies trained in crowd control.
He said crowd management failures were evident again this year, with more than 20,000 applicants arriving at once, no staggered reporting times, and inadequate stewards to control the queues at the stadium entrance.
“This is the military; they may not be well-versed in policing. They can work with the prison service or others, but there has to be multi-agency collaboration,” Andrews stated.
“We shouldn’t send 20,000 people to El-Wak Stadium again. Communication should go out telling hopefuls when to arrive and how long they will spend there,” he said. “At the heart of this is the duty of care.”
No Lessons Learnt
Andrews added that a proper risk assessment should inform decisions on crowd flow, screening, and emergency planning, but argued that Ghana’s safety culture remains weak.
“I can categorically say that when it comes to these events, the only lesson we learn is that we don’t learn any lesson,” he said.
“We had a mass casualty in 2020. What did we learn? We still bring in all of these people, and we still experience this.”
The Tragedy
At least six people died in the latest stampede during a Ghana Armed Forces recruitment exercise earlier this week.
The country has overhauled its security services recruitment process after the incident, the Interior Ministry said on Friday.
The sector Minister Muntaka Mubarak said an online application portal for the Police, Prisons, Fire and Immigration Services will open on Monday, but stressed that new crowd-control measures will be enforced to prevent a repeat of the El-Wak Sports Stadium tragedy, which killed six people and injured dozens.
New Protocol
In a social media post shared by government spokesperson Felix Kwakye Ofosu, the minister stated that multiple screening centres will be set up in every region, including up to 15 locations in Accra, to disperse large crowds.
“No screening centre will host more than 1,000 applicants per day,” Ofosu said. “Five hundred will be screened in the morning and another 500 in the afternoon.”
He warned that any applicant who arrives outside their scheduled time slot will be automatically disqualified, a strict measure aimed at reducing congestion.
Partisan Posture
In a related development, a security consultant from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge has called for stronger oversight by the media, civil society, and Parliament, arguing that entrenched partisanship and weak scrutiny are undermining reforms in the country’s security sector.
Dr Emmanuel Sowartey said the media must position itself “in the boardroom of major decision-making” if Ghana is to improve its security governance and avoid repeating the failures highlighted by last week’s military helicopter crash report.
“If the media positions itself in the boardroom of major decision making… they will ask questions that are very critical, and those questions would help gradually transform institutions,” Sowartey said on Asaase Radio’s The Forum Saturday.
His comments follow a public debate set off by the investigative committee’s report into the August 2025 helicopter crash that killed senior military and government officials.
Sowartey further criticised what he described as an “overpoliticisation” of national security issues, saying partisan behaviour often clouds judgement and suppresses necessary reforms.
“It is said that when parties are in opposition, they ask brilliant questions; when they flip, they support the status quo,” he said. He added that incumbent governments are often “notorious in defending the status quo” even when evidence shows serious institutional weaknesses.
Sowartey also questioned the effectiveness of parliamentary oversight, saying lawmakers should “bridge the gap” between detailed investigative findings and real-world implementation.
“Sometimes when you are translating findings into concrete realisation, they might be brilliant but will not gain adequate traction on the ground,” he said.
