Ghana activists warn an anti-gay bill threatens the young democracy’s institutions

ACCRA — Frank gets disturbing flashbacks every time he sees a police officer.

As a staff member of the group LGBT+ Rights Ghana, he knew police could intimidate people for bribes, or say homophobic things. But he didn’t realize that police could enter his home without a warrant, round everyone up for being LGBTQ+ and gloat about expecting a bonus for doing so.

“It just shows you how far things are going in this country,” said Frank, who asked that his real name not be published due to safety concerns.

The Canadian Press travelled to Ghana as part of an investigative series looking into a global backslide in LGBTQ+ rights and the consequences for Canada, including the impact this trend has on democratic institutions.

Earlier this year, Ghana’s parliament passed a bill that criminalizes identifying as LGBTQ+.

The law is similar to those already in place in Uganda and Russia, and came after an orchestrated push by American evangelical groups for Ghana to go beyond existing laws barring anal sex, which were rarely enforced.

The country’s top court is deliberating whether the legislation MPs passed in February complies with the country’s constitution. It has become a flashpoint in the country’s general election, taking place on Dec. 7.

Ghana’s bill isn’t yet law, but it’s already changing lives in the country, which prides itself on being the first sub-Saharan African state to gain independence from European colonization, and a bastion of democracy in West Africa where other countries face frequent coups d’état.

“Ghana has established strong democratic credentials,” reads Global Affairs Canada’s profile of the country. “Freedom of expression, a dynamic press and an active civil society are part of the Ghanaian political landscape.”

And yet human rights groups are worried that all those principles are under threat.

Economic woes have created fertile ground for American evangelicals to sow the seeds of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, encouraged by politicians facing an angry populace.

“We are being recolonized, without us recognizing we’re feeding into somebody’s agenda that is not healthy for our young democracy and for social cohesion,” said Audrey Gadzekpo, who chairs the Center for Democratic Development Ghana.

For Frank, the feeling his country had gone askew started one evening late last year. His transgender roommate was arrested by police at one of the roadside checkpoints that are common in Ghana, similar to drunk-driving stops in Canada.

Her appearance roused suspicions, and police searched her bag to find hormone pills that they believed to be illicit drugs.

The officers brought her to the home she shares with Frank and other LGBTQ+ people and demanded entry, especially after seeing rainbow flags on the wall behind the person who answered the door.

A video, filmed that night by one of the residents and shown to The Canadian Press, shows a Ghana Police officer in a brimmed hat, telling the five people in the home that it’s illegal to be gay.

Frank says the officer bragged that he’d likely get a bonus for arresting gay people under the new bill. The group stayed in a holding cell overnight, until prosecutors arrived and had the group released because they hadn’t committed any crime.

Alex Kofi Donkor, the head of LGBT+ Rights Ghana, said the backlash started in earnest with a conference held in Ghana in 2019 by the World Congress of Families, a U.S.-based evangelical group.

According to reports from conference attendees, speakers warned that sexual education in schools and homosexuality were Western plots to depopulate African countries and import ungodly beliefs.

In January 2021, Donkor’s group opened a resource centre, with the idea of having a physical space where gender and sexual minorities could find support in the face of widespread discrimination.

Donkor hoped that people kicked out of jobs or school could find legal recourse, as well as resources to help them find new opportunities.

A few dozen people came for the opening of the centre, including the ambassadors of Denmark and Australia.

Three weeks later, photos of the event hit the news.

Talk radio decried foreign ambassadors for trying to turn Africans gay. A bowl of condoms — a common sight in sexual-health centres — was cast as evidence of an orgy. National security police raided the centre, while angry mobs stormed the premises of other groups thought to be supporting LGBTQ+ people.

Donkor offered interviews to local media, whom he accused of ignoring his requests or asking sensational questions.

“We really came to speed with the depth of what we are dealing with,” he said.

After intimidation at public events, Donkor’s group limits itself to hikes in the countryside or events like book readings at secret locations.

Both Donkor and Gadzekpo fear Ghana is going through a repeat of the economic crisis it endured in the early 1980s, when thousands fled for work abroad and drought caused widespread hunger. At the time, American evangelical missionaries spread the word that sex outside of marriage was causing financial and ecological collapse.

By the 1990s, religion was still influential, but the republic was strictly secular.

Today, Ghana faces its worst economic crisis in a generation.

Michaella Gyatsen, head of a feminist artist collective in Accra, said youth can’t find jobs, life has become unaffordable and police have cleared out protests calling for better economic conditions.

“We don’t know any systems of redress, so we are frustrated (and) we are tired,” she said.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a debt crunch across most of Africa that has many countries spending more on interest payments than health and education. Weather shifts linked to climate change have hit cocoa production in Ghana, sending global chocolate prices soaring.

The anti-gay bill could make things worse.

The World Bank froze new loans to Uganda after that country passed its own law criminalizing LGBTQ+ identities. The legislation caused an uptick in LGBTQ+ Ugandans seeking asylum as well as the closure of some HIV clinics.

This spring, Ghana’s finance ministry leaked its internal recommendation that the government defer enacting its bill until the lengthy court review takes place. The document warned that Ghana would likely lose US$3.8 billion in World Bank funds, and thus derail a massive debt restructuring from the International Monetary Fund.

With an already dire financial situation, Gyatsen has noticed preachers scapegoating Ghana’s economic woes on LGBTQ+ people, and politicians who bring up the bill when unpopular policies take shape, such as tax hikes.

She says there’s been a cultural shift in the country, where people feel emboldened to harass those who stand out, and target their frustration against minorities.

“History proves it, every time. The easiest way to commit some kind of genocide or to commit some kind of crime is to remove the humanness from whichever people that are targeted. And that’s what we are seeing in Ghana now,” said Gyatsen.

Kwaku, who requested his real name not be published due to safety concerns, describes street harassment and dirty looks from formerly chatty shopkeepers.

When his friends hit the town, there was a fruit vendor who used to regularly compliment his edgy outfits, whether they included a sequined tank top or bright pink heels. Now, the woman avoids eye contact.

When he wore bell-bottomed jeans and knitted tank top to a central market, a random passerby warned him that the police chief was going to come for LGBTQ+ people.

Gadzekpo’s democracy group is hearing much worse.

“It’s like open season on LGBTQ+ people. We get reports of them being attacked, being lured, being blackmailed, being harmed, just for being who they are — or people even suspecting what they are.”

She calls the bill insidious, because it requires parents, teachers, neighbours and landlords to report suspected homosexual activity.

“The bill puts a responsibility on everybody to snitch on people,” she said, adding that this will have the effect of harming social cohesion.

Yet that view is rare on Ghana’s airwaves. What’s often simply referred to as “the bill” has widespread support on the talk-radio shows that dominate Ghana’s media sector.

Gadzekpo’s group met with dozens of journalists about the bill before it was passed, and found a slim minority had actually read the legislation, despite publishing dozens of reports about it.

Instead, media outlets divulge the names of people accused of being LGBTQ+ and frequently warn about the prospect of gay weddings, despite them not being legal in Ghana.

For example, a March 2023 report on the popular digital news site GhanaWeb recounted armed military police storming an LGBTQ+ party.

“According to eyewitnesses, although it was a party, it was on the verge of becoming a wedding ceremony if it hadn’t been for the intervention,” the report reads.

Newspapers have published questionable investigations, such as a February 2022 report in the newspaper Vanguard claiming gay people were recruiting teens by distributing laptops with pre-installed porn.

The proposed bill would make it illegal to publish views deemed to advocate for homosexuality, and would disband LGBTQ+ rights organizations.

“We are a young democracy,” said Gadzekpo, who is a University of Ghana journalism professor.

“We need to be deepening democratic practice. This bill flies against that; it doesn’t help us to be tolerant of difference.”

She believes Ghana’s “moral panic” over homosexuality is distracting from issues affecting women, such as a documented rise in teen pregnancies, and what the Paediatric Association of Ghana calls “the perceived acceptance of child marriages.”

Ghana’s high commission in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication, and Canada’s high commission in Ghana declined an interview.

But Ottawa has raised concerns about Ghana’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people in its submission to the recurring United Nations review of human rights in Ghana in June 2023.

The bill loomed large during that process, where 22 countries including Canada formally called on Ghana to better protect LGBTQ+ people. The country rejected each of those demands, insisting that despite the bill, Ghana had never endorsed inflicting harm on minorities, and “abhorred any form of violence or brutality against any group.”

With the rising amount of hate, Donkor is frequently asked if he’ll seek asylum abroad. He’s been to Canada and Denmark for various conferences, but said the idea of making a refugee claim is painful, as it would mean abandoning hope for a better future in Ghana.

“I just want to give myself some chance to believe in humanity,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 1, 2024.

This is the third story of an eight-part series investigating a backsliding of LGBTQ+ rights in Africa and the consequences for Canada as a country with a feminist foreign policy, which prioritizes gender equality and human dignity. The reporting in Ghana, Cameroon and Kenya was written with financial support from the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship.

Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press