On the morning of 12 November 2025, six young Ghanaian women lost their lives in a crowd crush at the El-Wak Sports Stadium in Accra. Twenty-eight others were hospitalised. A Board of Inquiry was constituted. Four months later, its findings have not been made public.
The Ghana Armed Forces announced on 17 March 2026 that the first batch of 2,000 recruits, including 18 survivors of the stampede and 5 persons sponsored in memory of those who died, would report to their regional centres. The recruitment continues. The accountability does not.
That is not acceptable. What happened at El-Wak was not an act of nature. Over 506,000 young people had applied for 5,000 security services positions. Thousands converged on a single stadium for physical screening.
Many arrived the night before, camping outside in the dark because they had no money for a second trip and no confidence the system would give them another chance. When military personnel arrived at the gates at 6:20 a.m., the crowd surged. Six people never went home.
The Ghana Armed Forces described it as “an unexpected surge of applicants who breached security protocols.” But if half a million applications had been received for 5,000 jobs, and the state elected to conduct mass physical screening at a single large stadium without staggered reporting times, batch scheduling, or pre-positioned emergency medical teams, then the question of foreseeability cannot be dismissed. The state organised this gathering. The state is accountable for how it was managed.
President Mahama visited the injured. Recruitment in Greater Accra was suspended. Officers were asked to step aside. Those were appropriate immediate steps. But a Board of Inquiry whose report is never published is not accountability, it is the appearance of it.
The ABAN Center for Global Policy demands the full and immediate release of the Board of Inquiry’s findings.
Beyond transparency, findings must become a binding operational protocol. No future physical recruitment exercise should proceed without strict batch scheduling where applicants are assigned specific reporting windows by reference number or region, so that no single venue receives an unsafe volume of people at once. Physical screening must be decentralised to multiple smaller, certified venues per region, not concentrated in large stadiums.
A NADMO representative must be present at every recruitment venue, empowered to halt proceedings if crowd safety thresholds are breached. Ambulances and medical personnel must be pre-positioned at all sites not as an aspiration, but as a mandatory requirement before any exercise commences.
The government must also establish a formal compensation mechanism for the families of the six deceased and the injured. This is a matter of moral obligation, not political discretion.
Advanced democracies make citizen safety a non-negotiable priority in every context, including administrative ones. A young Ghanaian who travels hours to apply for a government job must be as safe as any other citizen in a state-managed environment. The loss of six lives in a recruitment queue is not a tragedy to be filed away. It is a policy failure that demands a public reckoning.
The families of those six women are owed answers. Every young Ghanaian who will apply in the next cycle is owed a guarantee that what happened at El-Wak will never happen again. A published report and codified protocols are the minimum the state can offer.
Silence is not mourning. It is negligence.The ABAN Center for Global Policy is a youth-led think tank committed to evidence-based policy advocacy in Ghana. The full ABAN Brief is available at
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Source: www.myjoyonline.com
