When the State Cannot Name Its Own Ghost, Whose Freedom Is Actually at Stake?

Ghanafuor, we have a problem, and it is not the one the police, some of whose top brass seem to forget that this is a democracy, think they are solving. Hmmm, 3y3nsem piiiii, ooooo.

Be that as it may be, it so happens that on the night of Sunday 13 September, three people in black uniforms arrived at a house in Hansua, in the Bono East Region, and took away a 40-year-old senior nursing officer named Salomey Awity Baffoe. She is a mother of three. She works at Abrafi Women and Children's Hospital in Techiman. Her brother says no warrant was shown and no grounds were given. She was put before Adenta Circuit Court 1, remanded for two weeks on a charge of abetment in connection with the publication of false news, and is due back in court on 30 September.

Four days later, the Ghana Police Service published a wanted notice naming a different woman, Barbara Asantewaa Kodua, 40, as the operator of the TikTok account known as Ghana Jollof. The notice said she was last seen at Accra's international airport in August 2022 and is believed to be in the United Kingdom. The account, which has some 160,000 followers, kept posting after Baffoe's arrest. In one video, a distorted voice said the police had arrested the wrong person. Kodua has since dared the government to extradite her, denies any connection between Baffoe and the account, and says the arrest is political because Baffoe's husband, who lives abroad, is an active member of the opposition.

Ghanafuor, let us begin with the logic, because the logic is where this curious case collapses. A state that does not know who operates an account cannot know who abetted it. Simple.

The police have named one woman as the author and detained another as her accomplice, while the author broadcasts from abroad and the accomplice sits in custody. If the identification is sound, the detention is redundant. If the identification is unsound, the detention is arbitrary. There is no third possibility, and the state has not offered one. It can never do so in this particular matter. Full stop.

Furthermore, Ghanafuor, at a media briefing on 18 September, the Director-General of the Criminal Investigation Department, Commissioner Lydia Yaako Donkor, set out the case. Forensic examination of Baffoe's phone and mobile-money records, she said, showed that Baffoe recruited others to redistribute the account's videos, and that "highly influential persons" transferred substantial sums to Baffoe, who passed money to Kodua and others, with remittances also flowing back from the United Kingdom. The publication at the centre of it is a video alleging an attempted coup at Jubilee House.

Notice what has happened to the charge. It began as speech. It has become finance. The state is no longer prosecuting a woman for what she said. It is pursuing a network for what it allegedly funded. That shift matters, because it changes the question from whether the speech was criminal to whether the money was political. And on that question, the public has been told the conclusion without being shown the evidence. We are asked to accept that influential people paid for content, that a nurse was the conduit, and that this amounts to incitement, on the strength of a press briefing. In a republic, that is not how a case is made. It is how officialdom's high-falutin PR toli narrative is disseminated.

We must now consider the method, which is the part that should trouble even those who cannot stand the account. Three people in black uniforms, at midnight, no warrant, no stated grounds, a mother of three removed from her home while her family was left not knowing where she had been taken. Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah, the MP following the case, put it precisely: when a person is taken from her house and her family does not know where she is, that is no longer arrest, it is abduction. An Ahafo communications director for the governing party's rival warned that the method hands criminal gangs a template. Both are right, and neither observation depends on Baffoe's guilt. A state that can seize a citizen at midnight without paper has taught every kidnapper in the country how it is done.

Then there is the pattern, which is the real indictment. This is not an isolated act of overreach. Camila Alhassan was jailed for a year with hard labour over offensive and abusive content aimed at the President and the First Lady. Prince Ofori Fante Comedy and Yayra Abiwu, known as Akosua Jollof, were arrested in August 2025 over videos mocking the victims of the helicopter crash. Rita Konadu, Mahama Aminat, Prince Aboagye and Ebo Noah have all been charged. In September 2025, the President himself warned that the National Signals Bureau can track people anywhere in the country, and that those who publish hate speech would be dealt with under the criminal code for inciting violence and disturbing the peace. The police say at least six people are being prosecuted and that more arrests are coming.

Read those facts together and a doctrine emerges. It is not a doctrine about false news, which is a charge elastic enough to fit any criticism governments of the day, of all shades, find inconvenient. It is a doctrine about who is permitted to speak, and how loudly, and about what. The offence is not the falsity of the claim. The offence is the reach of the speaker.

Here is the deeper problem, and it is constitutional rather than criminal. Ghana's Fourth Republic was built on the premise that the state's power to punish speech is narrow and its burden of proof is heavy. That premise is being quietly reversed. The burden has migrated from the prosecutor to the accused, who must now demonstrate innocence to a public that has been shown a wanted notice and a press conference. The threshold has migrated from incitement, which requires a real and proximate danger, to offensiveness, which requires only that someone in authority take offence. And the venue has migrated from the courtroom to the briefing room, where findings are announced before they are tested and guilt is established in the public mind long before it is established in law. How can it be so in a country that prides itself as a peaceful and stable democracy, Ghanafuor?

The outrage is that this is how free speech dies in a democracy that still holds elections. Not by decree, not by a single dramatic law, but by the accumulation of small, defensible-sounding prosecutions, each one justified by the excesses of its subject, until the cost of speaking becomes unpredictable enough that reasonable people stop. The chilling effect does not require a conviction. It requires only the demonstration that the state will come at midnight, and that the burden of proving you are not the person they are looking for will fall on you.

And let us be honest about the account itself, because the argument is weaker if we pretend otherwise. Ghana Jollof is not a martyr for civility. It has attacked the President and the First Lady in terms that no serious person would defend, and its reported response, mocking the President, the First Lady and the presiding judge, does nothing to cool the situation. But a republic does not protect speech because the speech is admirable. It protects speech precisely because the speech is not, and because the moment the state is permitted to decide which criticism is legitimate, no critic is safe. The test of a free Ubuntu African society is not how it treats drunken court jesters spewing foolishness in palaces nationwide. It is how it treats its loudest, least agreeable citizens, like the uncouth, depraved, unhinged cowards behind TikTok's @GhanaJollof.

Ghanafuor, that begs the question: Kofi, 3nti what would a serious response look like? For starters, the police should publish the evidence of incitement, not merely assert it. The charge against Baffoe should be tested in open court on disclosed material, or dropped. The Attorney-General should explain the legal basis on which a nurse in Techiman is being held in connection with an account operated from the United Kingdom. Parliament's Committee on Defence and Interior should ask who authorised a midnight operation without a warrant, and under what authority. And the National Signals Bureau's tracking capability, announced as a deterrent, deserves a public accounting of its legal limits, because a surveillance power described only by its reach is a surveillance power without a leash, which is dangerous in the hands of future would-be tyrants.

Naturally, none of this requires sympathy for Ghana Jollof. It requires only that we hold two truths at once: that the account may well have crossed a line, and that the state has not yet shown us where that line is, or that it was crossed, or that the woman in custody had anything to do with it. A republic that cannot hold both truths at once will lose the ability to hold either. Yoooooooooooo…

The state has named a ghost and imprisoned a nurse. Until it can explain how those two facts belong in the same sentence, the question is not whether Ghana Jollof is guilty. The question is what kind of country we are becoming, that we would let it try.

Hmmm, Anansesemkrom Ghana paaa diy33. Tweaaaaaaaaa…