BAWKU MEDIATION REPORT, STATE CENSORSHIP, LEGALITY, MORALITY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE STATE OF GHANA
BAWKU MEDIATION REPORT, STATE CENSORSHIP, LEGALITY, MORALITY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE STATE OF GHANA.
BY MARTIN A. B. K. AMIDU
STATE CENSORSHIP
Ghanaians did not vote on 7 December 2024 for a creeping dictatorship in which the government resorts to censorship of critical articles written by citizens and published by the state-owned media demanding answers to the constitutional and legal basis of the exercise of executive power perceived to be arbitrary simply because the government is unable to provide reasonable answers to such critical critique about policies affecting the nation.
On 19 December 2025, I published my reaction to the Bawku Mediation Report and the Government Official Statement on it which was reported by the private media. Graphic Online, a state-owned media, also published my article the same afternoon around 14 hours in its opinion column under the headline: “Martin Amidu Writes on Bawku Mediation Report and questions gov’t’s GHc1 billion...” In less than an hour, Graphic Online, a state-owned media bound by Chapter 12 of the 1992 Constitution, was ordered to block the content of the article from its website. Any attempt to open the article produces the result: “Graphic Online 404 Article not found”.
This is clearly censorship which is expressly prohibited under Articles 162 and 163 of the Constitution, apart from the unlawful violation of the inalienable fundamental right to free speech. I do not mind if the article was not published at all, but to publish it and to censor it immediately thereafter connotes dictatorship which no patriotic citizen should allow the President or his government to assume.
My article which was published by Graphic Online and immediately censored was simply demanding as a matter of right that the government provide to Ghanaians answers on the constitutional or statutory basis for the circus performance at the Jubilee House on 16 December 2025 on the presentation of the Bawku Mediation Report and the subsequent publication of the Government Statement on 17 December 2025 accepting its findings and recommendations. All that the government needed to do was to answer the queries transparently and accountably in the marketplace of ideas exemplified by the media which is the essence of democracy and rule of law under the Constitution and not to cowardly block opinions that have been published by one of the leading state-owned media.
What is the essence of participatory democracy when the government resorts to censorship to silence citizens of Ghana in the state-owned media? How are citizens empowered to assist the government to achieve good governance in accordance with the Constitution and laws of Ghana when the government uses the state-owned media to silence views critical of policies appearing to be arbitrary? In a democratic dispensation being turned into a pseudo theocracy against the dictates of the Constitution, the one avenue to talk to the human God is to speak to the wind which is what I do by publishing my views in the media. That is the only way any well-wishing citizen can help the government to succeed in accordance with the Constitution. I am not going to be a sycophant who leads the President into a dictatorship prohibited under the 1992 Constitution.
MORALITY AND PEACE BEFORE LEGALISM
There would have been no country called Ghana without legalism: that is why those citizens from the Volta Region who advocated for the secession of the former United Nations Mandated Territories of the Trans Volta Togoland of the Gold Coast Colony (TVT) they referred to as Western Togoland, from Ghana were arrested for treason, tried, and sentenced to death. The Gold Coast Colony, which was later christened the Gold Coast Colony and Ashanti, was the product of might and legalism, not peace and morality. The British Protectorate of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Colony (NT) was the product of legalism. A plebiscite had to be held in the Trans-Volta Togoland under the British mandate for the people there to decide whether they wanted to join the Gold Coast and Asante to become one independent nation. The Northern Peoples’ Party (NPP) which (like the National Liberation Movement – NLM- ) also campaigned against independence for the NT on grounds of lack of development managed to secure the majority of the northern seats in the National Assembly but lost the overall vote on independence that enabled the Northern Territories to be incorporated into what is today Ghana. That was legalism and not morality.
Ghana, therefore, became one nation with one people with one great destiny by virtue of the legalism created by the Ghana Independence Constitution, 1957, which subsequently became the Fourth Republic we live in today beginning with the 1960 First Republican Constitution. The negotiations for the status of the institution of chieftaincy as one finds in the 1992 Constitution was not achieved through morality or peace, but through a long history of legalism binding on every chiefdom and citizen in Ghana.
The difficulty with the morality and peace before legalism proposition is that it is a theoretical licence for the justification of subjectivism. The most recent example of such subjectivism can be found in what the Asantehene was reported to have told his chiefs and elders at the end of year address to Asanteman after this performance at the Jubilee House on 16 December 2025 at the presentation of the Bawku Mediation Report that he adjudged to be binding on the two chiefdoms in conflict from northern Ghana as though he was the reviewing authority for the Supreme Court.
On 20 December 2025, a fellow citizen of Ghana who had read my articles on the mediation and criticisms to them drew my attention to the following declaration attributed to the Asantehene:
‘“The creation of the House of Chief is not our culture. Some cultures follow the patrilineal system; we follow the matrilineal system. Do not mix the two. I will not allow anyone in Ghana to change my culture - I am the Asantehene. Let everyone know that I will cancel any rule of that sort... No one should bring such a proposal to the table; it will not work. The National House of Chiefs has no authority over me. If it attempts to assert such authority, I will instruct the chiefs under my jurisdiction to stop attending its sittings – and if the government wishes, it can arrest all of us,” – Asantehene, Otumfour Osei Tutu II.’ (Emphasis supplied).
The citizen commented as follows: “ I came across this on social media. I am afraid this man can destroy our democracy and country.” My reaction to the message was: “I hope it is fake news on social media. Otherwise, it is serious.” I then set out to confirm that the message conveyed to me from the social media about what the Asantehene was alleged to have said to the chiefs and elders of his chiefdom at the Manhyia Palace was true. Some one later sent me a video of it on Tik Tok. I could not believe my ears and eyes for what I heard and saw. The Asantehene had turned himself into a one-man Supreme Court of Ghana adjudicating on the status and jurisdiction of the National House of Chiefs instead of utilizing the legal process to ventilate any objections to whatever the House of Chiefs was doing in the Supreme Court of Ghana whose current Chief Justice is an Asante. Can one paraphrase Article 270 (1) and (2) of the Constitution on the institution of chieftaincy and leave out sub-clause 3 on grounds of neutrality, morality, and peace ignoring legalism?
The peace before legality proposition contains within it its own contradiction. For instance one cannot accept that the 1992 Constitution is the supreme law of Ghana and the foundation for the distribution of power in Ghana including the President who also derives his responsibility for peace, security, and national cohesion from the constitution, and in the same breath contend that the President has powers to pursue peace and morality outside his source of power and responsibility. That will be a sure path to autocracy under an unbridled theory of peace and morality before legalism as that will be allocating unrestrained and subjective power to the President.
As for the contention that a “mediation is not law making nor adjudication” when the mediator himself states explicitly that his decisions are binding and not facilitative of joint agreements made by the parties themselves, my lived experience calls it convoluted thinking. No mediator can claim to make binding decisions and findings for parties in mediation under a regime of laws and not men in the name of peace and morality except where one is dealing with the marines. How does one support the notion that a mediator can declare his mediation binding while at the same time stating that no King is above the law but can morally assert that he, the mediator, is outside the binding force of the 1992 Constitution on chieftaincy matters when it comes to his personal powers and customs as a Chief?
The reality of my lived experience as a person who hails from Bawku and has been involved as a public officer in the settlement of the Bawku identity conflict is that peacebuilding that is not conducted within the confines of the law which created the nation state is a recipe for cyclical conflict and not peace. I am not speaking from the high horse of academia but as a person whose only qualification is to have at various times been a participating member of two Regional Security Councils, and later as a member of the National Security Council that has overseen the Bawku Conflict and other conflicts in Ghana.
THE TRUTH WILL ALWAYS STAND
John Dramani Mahama himself has told the entire world that during his previous tenure as President of Ghana he enforced the status quo ante the coming into force of the 1992 Constitution on the Bawku Conflict and he would do so when elected again as President. John Mahama was elected President and assumed office on 7 January 2025 as the President of Ghana. More people have since died from the Bawku conflict than in the previous eight years before he assumed office because he claimed to have appointed a mediator to facilitate an agreement between the parties to settle their conflict.
All I asked for was the written terms of reference for the mediator which neither the mediator nor his appointing authority, the President of Ghana provided in the Mediator’s Report or the Government Official Statement accepting the findings and recommendations of the report. Part of the recommendation is for the mediator to continue a reconciliation facilitation between the chiefdoms in conflict – the parties – as a charge on public funds.
Two days after my humble demand for the authority for the appointment of the mediator, the mediator himself who had stated on 16 December 2025 at the presentation of the Bawku Mediation Report to the President in the glare of the media and in the presence of supporting actors that included the President National House of Chiefs that no King is above the law turned round to say that he is above the law and the National House of Chiefs.
Putting legalism aside, where is the moral foundation for the mediator to mediate any other chieftaincy conflict from any other chiefdom in Ghana except his own chiefdom? One cannot say that the findings and recommendation of such a mediator are binding on the chiefdoms in the Bawku conflict without being guilty of double standards or double speak. What is binding is the status quo recognized under the 1992 Constitution on the Bawku Chieftaincy Affairs which as candidate for the Presidency, John Mahama repeated on 3 February 2024 at the Bawku Naba’s palace that: “...there is no chieftaincy conflict in Bawku because there is only one known King, Asigri Abugrago Azoka II.” Enforce the law!
INTIMIDATION, FEAR, AND TWISTING FACTS WILL NEVER WORK
There is an author who calls himself a professor whom I know comes from Kumawu in the Asante Region and is resident in America or has taken American nationality who sat in the comfort of New York City to respond to my article dated 15 December 2025 preferring to address me as “the exceptionally privileged Frafra native” and President Mahama as “the Gonja native from the Akufo-Addo created Savannah Region” and “the Candidate-General Kwame Gonja Tumumba,...” but refers to the Asante Chiefdom as “the Great Asante Federation” He describes my article by stating that: “...it is logically scandalous and downright suicidal ....” and also as “downright preposterous and logically suicidal...” I do not know whether he is a spokesperson for anybody to send me an inuendo on my being downright suicidal for being critical of the announced circus performance at the Jubilee House on 16 December 2025. I will ignore his disparaging references to the President and me who come from the former NT by our tribes even though I am not a “Frafra native” but have grandmaternal roots there in Bolgatanga. But let me say without equivocation that I cannot be intimidated or put into fear through any subtle messages of suicidal innuendos connoting assassination by him or his mentors or their agents.
The author’s tribal diatribes remind me of the Asantehene’s end of year address to Asanteman in which he purposefully select only “the North” to make reference to when he said “...someone comes from somewhere, someone comes from the North and someone comes from somewhere..” without referring to the other “someone’s” (people) as coming from the West, East or South of Ashanti by geographical location. Being condescending to northerners as coming from the North or “ESREMN” or the bush or the grassland does not facilitate reconciliation and peace in Ghana. I do not blame anybody except John Dramani Mahama who also hails from the north for empowering such disparaging remarks about chieftaincy in the North. The truth will, however, always remain that a recently late Asante princess led the demand for the inclusion of Queen Mothers into the Houses of Chiefs on grounds of gender equality and not northerners to whom the custom of Queen Mother is alien.
I also want those who mischievously misrepresent my discourse on the Bawku Mediation Report with the fake headline: ‘”Martin Amidu calls efforts by Asantehene in Bawku crisis a gargantuan scam”? Must try hard!’ to understand that no amount of twisting or misrepresenting what I wrote will cow me into not following my conscience in defending the Constitution of Ghana. Referring to me as “a senior citizen” or whatever will also not deflect me from doing what is right and just in accordance with my conscience. Martin Amidu is his own Shepherd and not anybody’s sheep under the 1992 Constitution.
CORRIGENDUM
I discovered on 20 December 2025 accidental slips in my last article on “Martin Amidu’s Reaction to the Bawku Mediation Report and Government Statement” in relation to the dates of the events stated in the opening paragraph as “Wednesday 16 November 2025 and 17 November 2025” respectively instead of Wednesday 16 December 2025 and 17 December 2025. On page 3 the date 17 December 2025 was also accidentally stated as “17 October 2025”. Anybody following the events knows that the substantive dates intended were really 16 December 2025 and 17 December 2025. I am a lone ranger fulfilling my constitutional responsibilities as a citizen of Ghana writing in defence of the Constitution with my personal energy and resources: I regret the mix up in the dates and months. The substance of the discourse I believe is more important than the form but I feel impelled to acknowledge those accidental slips and take personal responsibility for them.
CONCLUSIONS
As long as the mediator and the President who appointed him are unable to provide the public with the terms of reference showing the authority of the mediator, I insist and repeat that “the concluding circus enacted and performed at the Jubilee House on 16 December 2025 at the presentation of the Bawku Mediation Report and the Government Statement on 17 December 2025 has the appearance of a gargantuan political scam by the government on the Bawku Conflict to justify the needless deaths between 7 January 2025 and 16 December 2025 which in my estimation exceeds those of the past eight years under the previous regime”.
The “One Billion Ghana Cedis (GHS1,000,000,000) Bawku Revitalization Fund over the next three years to be managed by a political committee juxtaposed against the GHc1.5bn Housing Investment delivery for the Ho Oxygen City Project over the next three years without a management political committee announced on the same day, 17 December 2025, raises suspicion on the political electoral undertones of the Bawku Revitalization Fund. Ghana deserves a government of laws and not of men. Morality has no place in such a design for transparent and accountable conflict resolution except where the law expressly includes the same moral principles. Unconstitutional state censorship cannot suppress the truth nor be a substitute for transparency and accountability of the elected to the electorate.
Martin A. B. K. Amidu
23 December 2025