Influential Ghanaians have come out against the country‘s anti-LGBT bill. Last week, Samia Nkrumah, a former member of parliament and chair of a major political party in Ghana, requested the president to veto an anti-LGBT measure, describing it as “brutal, harsh, and unjust.”
Nkrumah’s father, Kwame, is a legendary figure in African and Ghanaian history, having spearheaded the independence movement and served as the country’s first president and prime minister in the 1950s and 1960s.
On February 28, Ghana’s parliament enacted a harsh bill that enhances criminal penalties for consensual same-sex behaviour and criminalises persons and organisations who advocate for LGBT rights. Furthermore, the measure makes it illegal to fail to report an LGBT person to authorities, as well as to report anyone who uses their social media platform to create, publish, or spread anything that promotes actions prohibited by the bill.
Since then, significant figures, including Nkrumah, have lobbied President Nana Akufo Addo to reject the measure. This contains a memo from Ghana’s finance minister to the president, warning of the bill’s dire economic effects if it becomes law.
Ghana’s present criminal code, established from British colonial-era regulations, punishes same-sex behaviour between men with a maximum sentence of three years in jail. The new campaign for progressively draconian regulations has already had an impact on LGBT persons in Ghana. Following the bill’s introduction in 2021, twenty-one LGBT activists were wrongfully arrested and incarcerated for hosting a human rights education meeting because they were promoting homosexuality and the gathering was an illegal assembly.
On Ghana’s Independence Day, March 6, protestors gathered outside Ghanaian high commissioners in London, Johannesburg, and other cities to show pan-African and worldwide solidarity against the heinous and damaging legislation. In response to the bill, President Addo has stated that he will not allow the country to abandon human rights and the rule of law.
A quick veto once the law hits his desk would make that promise a reality.
