Re-imagine Ghana with Dr Hene Aku Kwapong: We must not become a Republic of Suspicion: A case for moderation in the LGBTQ debate

Ghana is having what appears to be an argument about LGBTQ.

On the surface, it looks like a cultural dispute. Scratch just a little deeper, and it becomes clear that it is something else entirely. It is a debate about what kind of country Ghana is becoming, and whether it understands the implications of that choice.

For a long time, this was not even a subject of public discourse. People lived as they lived, society functioned as it functioned, and the state had more immediate concerns. So why now. Why has this issue suddenly become a national preoccupation, drawing sharp lines between citizens, religious institutions, political actors, and civil society.

The easy answer is to say that this is about morality. But that answer is too convenient, and it avoids the harder truth. Societies rarely erupt into debate over questions that are truly settled. They argue when underlying conditions are shifting.

The most dangerous thing a society can do, especially a society as culturally complex as Ghana, is to turn private disapproval into public surveillance. A country can survive moral disagreement. Indeed, every serious country does.

What it may not survive, at least not without lasting damage, is the normalization of suspicion: citizens watching one another, families reporting one another, politicians rewarding denunciation, and the state inviting people to treat difference itself as evidence of threat.

That is the real danger in the current debate. Not that Ghanaians disagree about sexuality. They do, deeply. Not that churches, mosques, chiefs, families, activists, lawyers, and politicians hold competing views about rights, morality, and culture. That is inevitable. The danger is that, in trying to settle one controversy, Ghana may create a habit of suspicion that spreads far beyond LGBTQ issues and corrodes the very social fabric it claims to defend.

Suspicion is not a policy. It is a social solvent.

The case for moderation, therefore, does not require everyone to suddenly agree on sexuality. It does not require religious communities to abandon doctrine, parents to stop worrying about children, or citizens to pretend that Ghana is culturally identical to Amsterdam, Toronto, or San Francisco.

A serious argument for moderation begins somewhere more practical: Ghana is already a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multilingual, regionally diverse republic. It holds together not because everyone approves of everyone else’s way of life, but because the state has generally avoided making every disagreement a police matter.

That restraint is not weakness. In a diverse country, moderation is statecraft.

The proposed approach to LGBTQ legislation risks moving Ghana in the opposite direction. Recent reporting indicates that Parliament has approved a bill that would criminalize homosexuality and the promotion of LGBTQ+ activities, with penalties including up to three years in prison for identifying as LGBTQ+ and a duty to report prohibited acts to the police.

Human Rights Watch has warned that the legislation could expose not only LGBTQ people but also advocates, parents, teachers, journalists, doctors, donors, and human rights defenders to prosecution.  Earlier reporting also noted that Ghana’s finance ministry warned that a previous version of the bill could jeopardize about $3.8 billion in World Bank funding over five to six years.

Those are not minor details. They tell us that this is not only a moral question. It is an institutional question, an economic question, and, above all, a question about what kind of public habits Ghana wants to create.

A law that punishes violence, coercion, exploitation, or abuse is one thing. A law that invites citizens to report identity, association, speech, sympathy, and private life is something else. The first is law enforcement. The second is social engineering through fear.

The first casualty of denunciation politics is trust.

And trust is not a sentimental virtue. It is economic infrastructure. Societies with higher trust find it easier to do business, enforce contracts, build institutions, collect taxes, run schools, manage public health, and sustain democratic competition.

Societies with low trust spend enormous energy on guarding, evading, accusing, and retaliating. They substitute suspicion for rules and rumor for evidence. The costs are real, even if they do not appear as a neat line item in the national budget.

This matters especially in Ghana because Ghana’s national project has always been an exercise in pluralism. The country contains Akan, Ewe, Ga-Dangme, Mole-Dagbani, Guan, Gurma, Grusi, Mande, and many other ethnic and linguistic communities.

It contains Christians, Muslims, traditional believers, and citizens who live somewhere between or outside these categories. It contains matrilineal and patrilineal traditions, coastal and savannah histories, urban cosmopolitanism and rural conservatism, diasporic influence and local rootedness. Ghana is not a single village writ large. It is a negotiated republic.

That negotiation works only if the state is careful about the habits it legitimizes. Once the state teaches citizens that the way to defend morality is to suspect and report neighbors, it should not assume that this instinct will remain neatly confined to LGBTQ matters.

Political entrepreneurs are very good at repurposing tools. Today the target may be sexuality. Tomorrow it may be ethnicity, religion, party affiliation, land claims, chieftaincy disputes, migration status, or regional identity.

A society that becomes comfortable with denunciation does not usually stop where it began.

This is why Ghana’s multicultural reality should push the country toward moderation rather than escalation. A multi-ethnic society must be extremely cautious about laws that reward accusation. It must ask not only whether a law expresses majority sentiment, but whether the enforcement culture created by that law can be safely managed in a country where social identity is already layered and politically sensitive.

The question is not whether most Ghanaians approve of LGBTQ identity. Most probably do not. The question is whether disapproval should become the organizing principle of public administration. Should the police become arbiters of private identity?

Should teachers fear that ordinary care for vulnerable students may be interpreted as promotion? Should doctors worry that treatment will be politicized? Should journalists wonder whether reporting is advocacy? Should parents of LGBTQ children be pushed into silence or suspicion? Should every ambiguous friendship, household arrangement, or rumor become potentially reportable?

This is a recipe for social complication in a country that already has enough complexity to manage.

To see why Ghana is struggling with LGBTQ issue more clearly, consider the World Values framework (see diagram). It places societies along two axes. One measures the pull between traditional values and secular, rational ones.

The other measures the shift from survival to self expression. These are not abstract ideas. They reflect material realities. When societies are poor and insecure, they tend to emphasize conformity, authority, and social cohesion. When they become more prosperous and stable, they begin to tolerate diversity, autonomy, and individual choice.

Ghana sits, quite firmly, in the lower left quadrant. That is the domain of survival values and traditional authority. It is where social order is maintained not just by law, but by shared expectations and cultural boundaries. In such a setting, deviation feels threatening, not because people are inherently intolerant, but because the system itself depends on cohesion.

Now introduce economic change. Urbanization accelerates. Education expands. Digital connectivity exposes citizens to alternative ways of living. Diaspora networks feed back new norms. Suddenly, parts of society begin to move, unevenly, toward self expression values, even while the broader structure remains anchored in survival logic.

That tension is what Ghana is experiencing. And the LGBTQ debate is simply where that tension has surfaced most visibly.

But there is an even deeper layer to this story, one that economists will recognize immediately. It is a version of a trilemma.

Ghana wants three things at once. It wants deep integration into the global economy, with all the capital, trade, and technological flows that come with it. It wants to maintain a strong sense of national cultural identity, rooted in traditional values. And it wants to exercise sovereign control over its social and political order without external interference.

The problem is that, much like the classic trilemmas in economics, you cannot fully achieve all three simultaneously.

A country that integrates deeply into the global system does not just import capital. It also imports norms, expectations, and scrutiny. Global investors, institutions, and partners increasingly operate within frameworks that emphasize rights, inclusion, and predictability. At the same time, maintaining a rigid, non negotiable social order limits the flexibility required for that integration. And asserting absolute sovereignty in a deeply interconnected world comes at the cost of reduced access to external resources and influence.

So choices have to be made. Not necessarily explicit ones, but real ones nonetheless.

This is why the LGBTQ debate cannot be reduced to a simple question of acceptance or rejection. It is, in effect, an early signal of how Ghana intends to resolve its own trilemma.

Fortunately, parts of Ghana are moving. Cities are changing. Universities are changing. Digital culture is changing. The diaspora is feeding back different vocabularies and expectations. Young people are exposed to global ideas faster than Ghanaian institutions can interpret them. This produces anxiety. And when societies are anxious, they often seek symbolic targets.

The temptation is to believe that a hard law can stop cultural change. It cannot. It can drive people underground. It can encourage hypocrisy. It can create fear. It can empower informants. It can damage Ghana’s international standing. It can make health, education, family counseling, and community mediation harder. But it cannot make a complex society simple again.

This is the basic policy error. The law is being asked to do what law cannot do: freeze culture.

No country can police its way back to an imagined past. And Ghana’s own past was never as simple as today’s slogans suggest. Traditional society was often conservative, yes, but it was also pragmatic. Indeed, one of the things many Ghanaians have forgotten is that some of the very institutions now invoked as evidence of fixed tradition emerged from practical efforts to manage morally complicated social realities.

Matrilineality itself, in some historical explanations, can be understood as a social technology for resolving uncertainty around paternity, inheritance, legitimacy, and continuity. Put plainly, societies faced what some might call a moral problem — adultery, disputed fatherhood, contested heirs, and the fragility of lineage — and answered not by criminalizing whole categories of people, but by designing inheritance systems that protected social order.

The same institutional intelligence appears in the Akan practice sometimes described as the “female husband.” Among Asante, Fante, Akuapem, Akyem, Bono, and related Akan formations, woman-to-woman marriage or female-husband arrangements appeared most clearly where matrilineal inheritance, property, stool succession, and lineage continuity required creative solutions.

The arrangement was not a modern LGBTQ rights framework, and it should not be romantically misread as one. But neither should it be ignored. It shows that Ghanaian tradition at its best was not merely rigid. It was practical. It recognized a social problem, preserved family and lineage continuity, protected property and legitimacy, and did so without turning complexity into a police matter.

That is a lesson worth recovering. The deeper tradition is not panic. It is institutional problem-solving.

The strongest cultures are not those that panic in the face of ambiguity. The strongest cultures are those that know what must be protected, what must be debated, what must be tolerated, and what should be left to families, communities, pastoral care, and civil society rather than handed immediately to police and prisons.

To say this is not to deny that many Ghanaians have genuine moral concerns. They do. The argument for moderation fails if it treats those concerns as stupidity or bigotry alone. Religious conviction is real. Family anxiety is real. Fear of cultural erosion is real. Western condescension is also real, and it has often made local debates worse by making rights sound like foreign instruction.

But real anxiety does not automatically justify bad policy. Moral concern must still pass through institutional judgment. What exactly is the harm being addressed? Is criminal law the right instrument? Who will enforce it?

Against whom? With what evidence? At what cost? What opportunities for blackmail and false accusation will arise? What happens to public health? What happens to teachers, doctors, journalists, lawyers, and parents? What message does the law send about citizenship in a republic already managing ethnic, religious, and regional diversity?

These are not evasive questions. They are the questions serious countries ask before expanding state power.

A moderate Ghanaian settlement would rest on a few clear principles. First, the state should punish harm, not manufacture fear. Violence, coercion, sexual exploitation, abuse of minors, blackmail, and public disorder should be addressed firmly and neutrally. Second, the state should not criminalize identity. Criminalizing who someone is, or is alleged to be, gives the state a power that can easily be abused.

Third, religious institutions should remain free to teach their doctrines, while the state remains bound to protect citizens from violence and humiliation. Fourth, professional care by doctors, teachers, lawyers, counselors, and journalists should not be chilled by vague accusations of promotion. Fifth, Ghana should conduct its debate in its own constitutional language, not as an imitation of Western activism or a performance of anti-Western defiance.

This approach will disappoint absolutists. That is one of its virtues. The country does not need absolutism. It needs a workable social peace.

The pro-bill camp will say moderation is surrender. But this confuses restraint with weakness. A state that refuses to criminalize identity is not surrendering culture. It is recognizing that culture cannot be sustained by fear alone.

If Ghanaian family values are strong, they should not require a nationwide apparatus of suspicion. If religious teaching is persuasive, it should not need citizens to become informants. If tradition is alive, it should be able to argue, teach, guide, and mediate without demanding that every contested identity become a criminal file.

The anti-bill camp should also learn something. Rights language is necessary, but it is not sufficient. A politics that treats ordinary moral anxiety as backwardness will not persuade the country. Ghana needs a language of dignity that speaks through constitutional restraint, social peace, family responsibility, religious seriousness, and national cohesion. The argument is not simply that LGBTQ citizens have rights, though they do. The argument is that a republic that protects unpopular citizens from humiliation protects itself from becoming arbitrary.

Today’s unpopular citizen is a test of tomorrow’s constitutional order.

This is where the economics of the issue becomes plain. Countries do not develop only by building roads and ports, stabilizing inflation, and negotiating debt. They also develop by creating predictable rules and trustful relationships. Investors care about legal predictability.

Citizens care about fairness. Communities care about whether the state can be trusted not to turn rumor into coercion. Public health systems depend on people seeking help without fear. Schools depend on teachers being able to support vulnerable students. Courts depend on evidence rather than hysteria. A country that lowers social trust raises the transaction costs of everything.

The hidden cost of suspicion is that it makes ordinary life more expensive.

People become more guarded. Professionals become more cautious. Families become more secretive. Politicians become more opportunistic. Police become more discretionary. Courts become more burdened. International partners become more wary. Citizens learn to weaponize morality in private disputes. Over time, the country may discover that in trying to simplify one issue, it has made many other issues harder to govern.

Ghana does not have the luxury of making governance harder. The country already has serious work to do: jobs, debt, schools, health care, local government, infrastructure, sanitation, exchange-rate stability, corruption, industrial policy, agricultural productivity, urban planning, and youth opportunity. A politics organized around suspicion drains attention from these tasks. It offers emotional satisfaction where institutional performance is required.

That, perhaps, is why moderation is so important. Moderation refuses both denial and hysteria. It says that moral disagreement is real, but not every moral disagreement should become criminal law. It says culture matters, but culture is not strengthened by informant politics.

It says rights matter, but rights must be domestically grounded to endure. It says sovereignty matters, but sovereignty includes responsibility for consequences. It says Ghana’s diversity is not a nuisance to be suppressed, but a condition to be governed with care.

Ghana should therefore step back from the brink. It should reject any framework that turns citizens into informants. It should avoid criminalizing identity. It should protect people from violence, blackmail, and humiliation. It should allow religious and cultural institutions to speak freely, while insisting that the state governs citizens, not sinners. It should recognize that the law’s job is not to abolish disagreement. The law’s job is to keep disagreement from becoming persecution.

The choice before Ghana is not Western liberalism or cultural surrender. That is the false binary on which bad politics thrives. The real choice is between a confident republic and a suspicious one; between moderation and moral panic; between a state that punishes harm and a state that manufactures fear; between a society that understands its diversity and one that complicates it further by inviting citizens to police one another.

Ghana has enough ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional, and class complexity already. It does not need to add a new layer of officially sanctioned suspicion.

The wisest course is not silence. Ghana should debate. It should argue. It should teach, preach, persuade, counsel, and deliberate. But it should not build a republic of suspicion in the name of protecting family values. Once suspicion becomes normal, it rarely remains obedient to its first target.

And that is why moderation is not compromise for its own sake. It is national self-preservation.

Hene Aku Kwapong, CDD Ghana Fellow, Ecobank Ghana Board Member, Former Head of Management for Royal Bank of Scotland EMEA Credit Markets, formerly of Deutsche Bank, Microsoft, GE Capital and NY Economic Development Corporation.

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