The strategic policy paper by retired Ghanaian Colonel Festus Aboagye, which has come into journalists’ hands in recent weeks, contains many technical recommendations.
But its most consequential contribution to the Ghanaian debate is a single phrase. He calls it leased sovereignty. This article examines what the phrase means, why it echoes an older Ghanaian argument about the terms of independence, and what a serious reading of the past fifteen months’ agreements—military and economic—suggests about whether Ghana is still, in any meaningful sense, non-aligned.
The central finding
Aboagye defines leased sovereignty as the condition of a state that formally owns capabilities it does not control. The drone sits on Ghanaian soil, but the maintenance contract sits in Warsaw or Kyiv; the encryption keys sit in a European capital; the software update cycle runs on a schedule the supplier determines; the spare parts reach Accra through a supply chain Accra does not own. The platform is yours. Its operational life is not.
The paper documents this condition across three overlapping domains: the incoming EU drone and electronic warfare package; the Ukrainian defense cooperation architecture under negotiation; and the IMF Extended Credit Facility, whose external borrowing cap limits the range of partners with whom Accra can negotiate. It then proposes three-part governance architecture—a Data Sovereignty Audit, a binding Indigenisation Roadmap, and a national UAS Rules of Engagement framework—intended to convert delivered hardware into sovereign capability rather than branded dependency.
Military agreements: the Mi-17 lesson, unlearned
There is a historical rehearsal for leased sovereignty that Ghanaian readers will recognise. When Russia was sanctioned following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Ghana Armed Forces’ Mi-17 helicopter fleet—Soviet-origin airframes, supplied and maintained through Russian technical channels, nominally Ghanaian property—was effectively grounded. Spare parts stopped arriving. Maintenance teams withdrew. A capability Accra had owned, in the legal sense, for years became operationally unavailable through no decision Accra had made.
Expert assessment of the successor relationships is not encouraging. EU-funded drones whose software updates will come from Brussels-contracted firms; Ukrainian electronic warfare systems whose integration layer will be maintained by engineers whose country is at war; IMSI catchers whose firmware upgrade cycles are entirely in the gift of the supplier. Each relationship can deliver exactly what it promises tomorrow. None can guarantee, across a five-year horizon, that the political conditions sustaining the supply will hold.
EXPERT VOICE — “In many cases, drone manufacturers retain access to ISR data or provide cloud-based processing—meaning foreign servers hold sensitive national security footage… As noted in a 2023 report by the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, ‘The widespread externalisation of drone C2 undermines sovereign command authority and creates structural dependency on non-African actors.’”
— Africa Defence Magazine, “Drone Warfare in Africa: Successes, Setbacks and Sovereignty Concerns,” 2025
The Ukrainian dimension carries a specific fragility. Aboagye’s paper includes a stress-test matrix of five scenarios covering the Ukrainian supply relationship over two to five years: a frozen conflict in which Kyiv redirects defense industrial output to domestic reconstruction; a change of Ukrainian government that deprioritises African partnerships; an EU–AES escalation that pressures Accra to deepen its surveillance posture; a drone incident at the Burkina Faso border that detonates the whole architecture diplomatically; and American disengagement from AFRICOM that shifts EU dependence onto Ghana. The common thread across all five is that the conditions determining whether the Ukrainian relationship remains viable sit in places Ghana does not control. That is not a diversification of dependency. It is a consolidation of it.
What the forthcoming CDD-Ghana study adds, across the fifteen African states it surveys in early 2026, is the technical detail that makes the dependency structural rather than circumstantial. Regional drone platforms supplied under third-party defense grants are routinely designed to transmit surveillance data through externally hosted cloud systems, with processing architectures that structurally limit the recipient state’s sovereign control over the intelligence generated by its own equipment.
The study also found—and this is the more difficult finding—that recipient states typically lack the technical capacity to detect these backchannels. A state cannot audit what it cannot see. Unless an enforceable Data Sovereignty Audit is conducted before operational activation, intelligence gathered by a Ghanaian-operated UAS, in a Ghanaian border district, about threats to Ghanaian citizens, may reach Brussels or Kyiv before it reaches the NSC Secretariat in Accra. That is the operational definition of an intelligence outpost.
Economic agreements: the architecture of quiet foreclosure
The economic architecture being assembled around Ghana is less visible than the military one, but operates to the same end. The IMF Extended Credit Facility carries a present value cap on new external non-concessional borrowing—recorded in the Fund’s own programme documents at approximately US$250 million for 2025—which structurally narrows the range of counterparties with whom Accra can negotiate infrastructure finance. Add the bilateral debt arrangements concluded over 2025–26 with France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. Add the proposed bilateral free trade agreement with the United States. Add the Ukrainian agricultural cooperation proposal for a Ghanaian grain hub that would distribute Ukrainian exports across West Africa.
Expert analysis of the economic picture points in a consistent direction. Nelson Kwagbajei of Melbourne Capital, in a television interview around the April 2026 IMF–World Bank Spring Meetings, noted Ghana’s seventeen engagements with the Fund since independence and cautioned that fiscal mismanagement has historically re-emerged once programme oversight ends. A 2024 peer-reviewed study in the International Journal of Finance and Accounting, drawing on nationwide survey data, found a significant negative correlation between IMF programme engagement and the accessibility and quality of social services—and warned that consistent reliance on such loans can produce deteriorating living standards, increased dependency on foreign aid, currency depreciation, and restricted fiscal space for development. These findings do not disqualify the Fund programme; but they do disqualify the polite fiction that economic and security policy can be discussed in separate rooms. The cap is doing quiet foreclosure work that the security partnerships could not do openly.
The economic conclusion mirrors the military one. In both domains, Ghana is being asked to accept supplier relationships in which the terms are set externally, the review cycles are set externally, and the capacity to negotiate away the dependency—because Ghanaian institutions cannot yet audit what is being delivered to them—remains fenced off by the very structure of the arrangements. Dependency is being restructured, not dissolved.
Nkrumah’s question, still open
The phrase leased sovereignty is new. The thought is not. It is—almost word-for-word—the central argument of Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, published in 1965, less than a year before the coup that removed him from the presidency. Nkrumah’s insight was that formal political independence could be achieved while economic and technological dependence were left structurally intact, and that the residual dependence would, over time, hollow out the formal independence until the latter became ceremonial.
EXPERT VOICE — “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”
— Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), introduction
Sixty-one years later, a retired Ghanaian colonel writing inside the national security policy community has produced a document whose analytical core describes the same condition in updated vocabulary: cloud-based data routing architectures in place of raw material concessions; contractor lock-in in place of trade dependency; encryption-key custody in place of currency peg.
The instruments have changed. The argument has not. Contemporary scholarship makes the same connection explicit, describing how institutions such as the IMF and World Bank exert influence over domestic economic policies in developing countries through loan conditionalities—the very mechanism Nkrumah identified as the successor to direct colonial control.
There is an older word for what is at stake here, and it is worth retrieving it without irony. Non-alignment. The word has had a difficult career. It was born at Bandung in 1955, operationalised through the movement Nkrumah, Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and Tito built across the following decade, caricatured in the 1980s as a rhetorical posture without substance, and reanimated in the 2020s by a generation of African and Asian states which have rediscovered its practical utility in an international system where alignment with a single pole has become an expensive insurance policy with falling returns. Non-alignment, in the serious contemporary construction, is not the absence of partnerships. It is the presence of multiple partnerships held deliberately in tension, each bounded by terms that prevent any one of them from acquiring structural veto over the others.
On that definition, Ghana’s current posture is under active pressure. The overall conclusion of this piece—and of the colonel’s paper from which it takes its central concept—is that Ghana stands at a juncture that Nkrumah would have recognised immediately. The ceremony of independence has been conducted, and conducted twice: in 1957, and again in the language of the Accra Reset. What remains open is whether the terms of the agreements now being signed allow the ceremony to correspond to anything more than itself.
The architecture being assembled across early 2025 to the present—European equipment pointed north, American vehicles redirected from Niger, Ukrainian electronic warfare integration on a Sahel-facing frontier, an IMF borrowing cap that locks each economic tool away—does not, in its current form, answer the question in the affirmative. It does not have to answer it in the negative either. The answer is in the terms, and the terms, as of this writing, have not been published. That, sixty-one years after Nkrumah posed the question, is the fact that ought to concentrate Ghanaian minds.
Source:
www.graphic.com.gh