Every few months in this country, a new controversy erupts over something someone said, and within hours the same tired battle lines form. One side shouts free speech. The other side shouts insult. Almost nobody pauses to ask what either word actually means, and that confusion is precisely where the trouble begins.
Let me try to bring some clarity to it.
Free speech, properly understood, is the right of every citizen to hold opinions, express them, and criticise power without fear of arrest or state retaliation. Ghana’s Constitution guarantees this directly, protecting freedom of speech, expression, thought, and the press. The whole point of that guarantee is accountability. Government is not above criticism. Institutions are not above criticism. Public officials, however senior, are not above criticism. A democracy that cannot be questioned freely by the people it governs is not really a democracy, whatever else it calls itself.
That principle should not be controversial. Where the controversy actually lies is in what we choose to call free speech once we start using it.
Insult is not the same thing as free speech, and we do ourselves a disservice by pretending otherwise. Unfortunately, in our jurisdiction, many people insult others, sometimes crudely, sometimes cruelly, and then defend it under the banner of free expression, as though the label alone makes the content acceptable. Insult carries a cultural and moral dimension that free speech, as a legal right, does not automatically carry with it. Whether a particular remark is rude, disrespectful, or simply in poor taste is largely a matter of social judgement, upbringing, and context, not something the law is generally in the business of policing, and rightly so. But that same moral judgement does not mean every insult is legally protected speech either. It simply means most insults are a matter for society, culture, and personal conscience to sort out, not the police.
Where the law does, and should, enter the conversation is a different and narrower question entirely: criminality in speech.
There is a real difference between criticising a person’s performance in office and knowingly telling a lie about them. When someone accuses another person of a crime they know was never committed, when a false allegation is deliberately published to damage a reputation the accuser knows is undeserved, that is no longer simply speech exercising a democratic right. That is defamation, and in some narrow, clearly defined circumstances, it edges into conduct the law was designed to punish.
Ghana has actually already had this exact debate, and settled a significant part of it, over two decades ago. On 27 July 2001, Parliament unanimously repealed the country’s criminal libel and seditious laws, laws that had, for decades, allowed journalists and critics to be jailed simply for what they wrote or said about those in power. It was, at the time, a landmark reform, and Ghana was among the first countries on the continent to make it. Fittingly, and rather ironically given what would come later, the Attorney-General who oversaw that repeal was Nana Akufo-Addo, then serving under President Kufuor. Since that repeal, defamation in Ghana has properly been a civil matter. A person who genuinely feels their reputation has been wrongly damaged by a false statement has always had, and continues to have, a clear route available to them. They can sue for libel in a civil court and seek damages.
That, in fact, is precisely where law enforcement and the machinery of the State should stop, and precisely where many of our political actors, across different governments and different eras, have refused to stop.
Two provisions survived that 2001 repeal, and they have quietly become the new back door into the very culture the reform was meant to end. Section 207 of the Criminal Offences Act criminalises the use of threatening, abusive, or insulting words in public where it is likely to provoke a breach of the peace. Section 208 of the same Act, alongside a parallel provision in the Electronic Communications Act, criminalises the publication of false news likely to cause fear or public alarm. On paper, these read as narrow public order provisions. In practice, they have repeatedly been used to arrest journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens for little more than criticising a government or an official, exactly the outcome the 2001 repeal was designed to prevent.
This is the crux of the matter. The Constitution does give law enforcement the power to act where a person is genuinely, provably, and maliciously defamed, or where speech crosses into a real incitement to violence. That power exists, and it is legitimate. But it must be exercised as protection for genuine victims, never as a political weapon to silence criticism or punish embarrassment. When a public official feels insulted or maligned, the law already gives them a proper avenue. They can go to court and sue for libel, the same as any other citizen. What they should not do is reach for the machinery of the State, the police, the security services, or a compliant prosecutor, simply because a citizen’s words wounded their pride. Using political office to prosecute perceived insult is an abuse of power dressed up as law enforcement. Ordinary citizens, in turn, should not treat their right to free expression as a licence to maliciously slander politicians they dislike. Both sides of this line deserve to be taken seriously.
My real difficulty, however, has never simply been with the existence of these laws. It is with the hypocrisy and the double standards of our political elite in how they are applied and how they are opposed, depending entirely on who happens to be in power at the time.
In opposition, it is remarkable how quickly certain politicians discover a passionate, almost theatrical devotion to free expression. Every arrest becomes an outrage. Every prosecution becomes proof of an authoritarian government trampling on the Constitution. Statements are issued. Press conferences are held. Civil society is rallied. And they are not always wrong to raise the alarm. Nana Akufo-Addo himself, years after leaving the Attorney-General’s office, delivered a lecture in 2011 in which he described these very surviving provisions as unconstitutional vestiges of a repressive past, a position entirely consistent with his own record in 2001.
Then power changes hands, and something curious happens.
The same voices that once condemned every arrest under these provisions grow noticeably quieter when their own government begins making similar arrests, sometimes using the very same laws they once denounced as unconstitutional. Journalists and activists have continued to be arrested under Section 208 and its electronic cousin well after 2011, under governments led by the same people who once stood at podiums decrying exactly this conduct. How convenient it is to discover the unconstitutionality of a law only while sitting in opposition, and to rediscover its usefulness the moment one controls the machinery that enforces it.
This is not a problem confined to one party or one administration. It is a pattern, and patterns tend to repeat because we, the citizens, keep allowing them to.
Which brings me to my final point, and it is addressed less to the politicians than to the ordinary citizen reading this. Be wise about who you allow yourself to become a foot soldier for. The loudest insults hurled at politicians online rarely damage the politicians themselves. The people who actually pay the price, through arrest, through court appearances, through a criminal record that follows them for life, are almost never the strategists who quietly benefit from the noise. The politician whose supporters are busy insulting an opponent on their behalf is, more often than not, comfortably at home, his own children’s futures already arranged, while the ordinary young person doing the insulting on his timeline risks a police cell for his trouble.
Ask yourself, before you type the next insult on behalf of a cause or a candidate, who actually benefits if you are arrested, and who genuinely loses nothing at all.
Free speech is worth defending, fiercely and consistently, for everyone, in every administration, not only when it is politically convenient to do so. Insult dressed up as free speech deserves no such defence. And the law, whichever government happens to be holding its levers at the time, must never again become a tool to punish citizens for embarrassing the powerful.
Be wise. Your voice matters. Do not let it be borrowed by people who will not be standing beside you when the bill for it eventually comes due.