By: Roberta Gayode Modin
When six hopeful young Ghanaians lost their lives in a stampede during the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) recruitment exercise at El-Wak Sports Stadium on 12 November 2025, we ought to have stopped and asked ourselves: how did we allow this to happen and will we ever learn?
According to the GAF’s own statement, the tragedy was triggered by “an unexpected surge of applicants who breached security protocols and rushed into the gates ahead of scheduled screening.” The injured are receiving emergency care, and the recruitment exercise has been suspended pending investigation.
Negligence, but also deeper rot
Yes, this is an operational failure: inadequate crowd-control, poor scheduling, mis-management of a mass event. But it goes deeper. We are seeing a pattern in this country: a loss of vigilance, a dearth of innovation, and a complacency about the “avoidable”.
Take the recent helicopter incident involving senior government officials: before we have digested responsibility, before proper accountability has been established, another tragedy occurs. Then, repeat. The cycle of shock, condolence visits, meeting the bereaved families, some promise of compensation, and then… silence. And soon, everything is back to business as usual.
In the El-Wak case we see striking parallels: young people, many unemployed, desperate for a future – queue early, gather in large numbers; the institution tasked with their selection opens the gates, crowd surges, control fails, people die. And afterwards? Likely the same formula: official statement, rhetoric, promise of review, and then drive on.
Is queue-culture part of the problem?
We seem to queue for everything. Ghana-card acquisition: queues. Elections: queues. Jobs: queues. Now, recruitment into the military: queues. Does the act of queuing expose the system’s fragility? A queue is only orderly if infrastructure, scheduling and human-resource management support it. If the system says “come early, but we open late”, or “many thousands must gather early to be screened”, then queuing becomes a hazard, not a convenience.
Queues are not the enemy; it’s the way the system handles them. When people are allowed to queue in large numbers without clear appointment times or staggered access, risk builds. In the El-Wak case, the GAF admitted the surge began at about 06:20 hrs when people rushed the gates ahead of scheduled screening. That sounds like absence of appointment-slots, absence of clear crowd-management, and absence of contingency for human behaviour.
Innovation overdue
If we ban the word “queue” outright, we miss the point. The real fix is to modernise. Rather than “first-come, first-served” mass gatherings, systems should assign time-slots, limit numbers in waiting zones, use digital registration and verification ahead of time, open multiple gates, deploy crowd-control staff, stagger arrivals, and plan for emergencies. These are not rocket science: event-management standards around the world do this.
In a country facing youth unemployment near 39%—which drives the rush to join security services as a seemingly stable job opportunity—systems must shift from ad-hoc to regulated. When you know demand is huge, you must engineer for safety first.
Learning or forgetting?
Ghana is not without precedent. The 2001 stadium disaster at the Accra Sports Stadium left 126 dead. The lessons from that tragedy – locked gates, inadequate exits, crowd panic – were aired, but clearly not fully assimilated into other mass-events. Now we face another one. Are we doomed to re-learn the same lessons? It seems so.
Whenever tragedy hits, we engage in ritual: leaders visit families, condolences are offered, promises of investigations are made. Then everyday political life resumes, systems remain the same, and events repeat. The El-Wak case shows we still treat life-and-death scenarios like routine paperwork.
A call for accountability and redesign
The families of the six who died must be supported — not just with rhetoric, but with compensation, plus assurance of real change. The inquiry committee that the GAF has set up must publish its findings publicly, with timelines and responsibilities. The recruitment process must be paused until safety protocols are redesigned.
We must reshape these major public-service processes: digital registration, appointment times, crowd-monitoring, managed access. If public institutions cannot run safe recruitment drives, they cannot expect public trust.
Finally, for our leadership: stop normalising death
We cannot treat avoidable deaths as “sad but unavoidable.” When a chain of events is clearly predictable and preventable and yet we still accept the outcome — we allow death to become a normal cost of doing business in Ghana. That is unacceptable.
When the queue forms, let it mean dignity, not danger. When young people line up for a chance to serve their country, let the system honour them — not fail them. Let the six lives lost at El-Wak matter; let them spur change. If we continue pretending these are flukes, we will be complicit in the next one.
RELATED
At least six die in crush at Ghana military recruitment event.
