A Gulfstream V long-range jet — registration N529RL, operated by Tenax Aerospace, a Mississippi-based defence contractor that works closely with the US military — has become a near-daily fixture in the skies over northeast Nigeria. It takes off from Kotoka International Airport in Accra. It flies over Nigerian territory. It returns to Ghana. This has been happening since November 2025, when the aircraft was tracked deploying from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida — home of US Special Operations Command — to Accra.
On paper, Ghana is not a combatant in any conflict. In practice, it has become something more complicated: a hinge node — a stable platform enabling intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations in a volatile neighbourhood, at a moment when the United States has been forced out of the bases it built across the Sahel.
The Sahel Collapsed — and Accra Filled the Gap
To understand Ghana's current position, you need to understand what the United States lost to its north over the past three years. The scale of that loss is rarely stated plainly.
Military coups in Mali (twice), Burkina Faso (twice), Guinea, and Niger. Each new junta followed the same script: expel French forces, end Western security agreements, open the door to Russia's Africa Corps (the successor to Wagner Group).
Niger revoked its military agreement with the US in March 2024. The US vacated Air Base 101 in Niamey and, in August, Air Base 201 in Agadez — a $110-million drone facility built specifically for Sahel counterterrorism operations. The withdrawal was completed ahead of the September deadline. Russian military personnel moved in.
Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso — all under military juntas — officially left ECOWAS in January 2025 and formalised their confederation. The US now has no military presence in any of the three states. US Africa Command officials had already named Ghana and Ivory Coast as likely alternative hubs.
Multiple US assets redeployed to Ghana in November 2025, following a November 20 meeting between Nigeria's National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at which the deployment of air assets for intelligence gathering was agreed. Near-daily ISR flights over northeast Nigeria — where Boko Haram and ISWAP operate — began within days.
Ghana did not choose to become a regional security hub. It became one incrementally — through existing infrastructure, political stability, and a long-standing defense relationship with the United States that made it the obvious answer when the Sahel closed.
What Is Actually Happening from Accra
Platform: Gulfstream V (C-37A in military designation), modified for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Capable of flying at altitudes up to 51,000 feet with over 14 hours endurance. Typically equipped with electro-optical and infrared sensor suites for persistent overwatch.
Pattern: Near-daily departures from Kotoka International Airport, Accra. Operating area: northeast Nigeria, including the Nigeria-Chad border region where Boko Haram and ISWAP are most active. Returns to Accra.
Missions (per former US official): Intelligence collection on militant groups in Nigeria; locating a US missionary pilot kidnapped in Niger. Broader mandate: rebuilding US surveillance capacity in the region following expulsion from Niger.
Context: The flights followed Trump's November 2025 threats of military intervention in Nigeria over violence targeting Christian communities, and a formal US-Nigeria security cooperation agreement. Nigeria placed 300+ abducted schoolchildren and a declared security emergency on the political agenda in the same period.
The Mechanics of a Hinge State
Hinge states are rarely asked for permission in dramatic ways. Their involvement accumulates through routine decisions: airspace access, refuelling rights, contractor operations, logistics agreements, intelligence sharing. Each step is individually defensible. Collectively, they reposition the state closer to the front line without it ever formally crossing it.
Ghana's situation is more specific than it appears. Accra is not merely a convenient stopover. US officials have explicitly named it as one of the primary replacement hubs for the Niger bases. The aircraft operating from Kotoka are conducting the same missions — persistent overwatch of Sahelian and Nigerian militant activity — that were previously run from Air Base 201 in Agadez. The geography has changed. The function has not.
There is also a pointed irony in the regional picture. Analysts have documented that at least 15 officers trained under US security assistance programmes have been involved in 12 coups across West Africa and the Sahel during the same period the US was building its counterterrorism architecture there. The bases that Ghana is now functionally replacing were built partly as a response to instability that US-trained officers helped create.
The danger for Ghana is not immediate entanglement. It is quiet normalisation. Militant groups do not parse legal distinctions between combatant and logistics facilitator. They map capability, proximity, and perceived alignment. A state that is operationally useful to one party in a regional conflict becomes strategically relevant to all parties — whether it intends to or not.
The Questions Ghana Has Not Yet Answered
- Are the terms of contractor operations governed by transparent agreements with explicit limits — or are they accumulating by precedent?
- Does parliamentary oversight reflect the current operational reality, or does it lag behind what is being enabled from Ghanaian soil?
- Does intelligence generated from Ghanaian platforms flow back to Ghanaian institutions — or outward to foreign partners without domestic accumulation?
- Is there a defined ceiling on what Ghana will host — or does each new request simply extend the previous one?
- What is Ghana's contingency position if the security situation in Nigeria or the Sahel deteriorates further and the platforms operating from Accra become associated with lethal outcomes?
These are not hostile questions. Cooperation with the US brings intelligence exposure, training, and deterrent signalling. It can strengthen domestic capacity if managed deliberately. The problem is not the cooperation itself — it is the absence of an institutional framework that is equal in sophistication to the operations being hosted.
Ghana still has the capacity to define its role rather than simply accept it as it accumulates. That capacity is not permanent. Hinge states that drift do not announce their drift. The decisions that matter are the ones made quietly, in November, when an aircraft moves from a Florida base to Kotoka and begins flying daily missions — and the receiving country's parliament has not debated it, its citizens do not know it is happening, and its institutions have no framework for governing what follows.
Security in this era is not about where bombs fall. It is about where aircraft quietly take off — and who decided that they should.
Ghana's stability is a genuine strategic asset. The question is whether it is being managed or merely spent.
Hinge states that succeed treat access as leverage — consciously exercised, institutionally governed, with clear limits and clear returns. Hinge states that drift wake up to discover that decisions made incrementally have placed them closer to conflict than their politics ever debated.
Ghana still has that choice. But the window in which it is a choice, rather than a fact, will not stay open indefinitely.
Walter Kwami writes on systems, governance, and the structures that determine outcomes. This dispatch draws on flight tracking data reported by Reuters in December 2025, analysis by the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, and open-source reporting on the Alliance of Sahel States and US Africa Command repositioning.