The arrest of Apostle Daniel Junior Yaw Adjei by the Police Cyber Vetting and Enforcement Team, over a video in which he allegedly made derogatory comments about Prophet Muhammad, has been framed by many observers simply as a free speech question. It is not. It is a question about what happens when religious speech collides with public order law in a plural society and about how thin the line has proven to be, elsewhere in West Africa, between an offensive remark and a body count. Apostle Adjei’s continued refusal to apologize, communicated through his church, deserves to be examined against that regional backdrop, not just against Ghana’s own statute books.

Ghana Has No Blasphemy Law But That Is Not the Same as Having No Exposure

Unlike several northern Nigerian states, Ghana does not have a codified blasphemy law that criminalizes insulting a religion or a religious figure as such. What Ghana has instead is a public order framework principally the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29), which criminalizes acts done publicly that are likely to cause a breach of the peace or incite disorder, combined with newer digital-era instruments such as the Electronic Communications Act and the Cybersecurity Act, 2020 (Act 1038), which give police and regulators tools to act against online content considered to incite public disorder or spread harmful material.

This is the legal architecture under which the Cyber Vetting and Enforcement Team operates: not a charge of “blasphemy” in the theological sense, but a charge rooted in the state’s interest in preventing speech religious or otherwise from tipping into public unrest.

This distinction matters, and Apostle Adjei’s legal team will likely lean on it. But it is also a distinction that can be overstated as a source of comfort. The absence of a blasphemy statute does not mean the absence of legal risk, nor does it mean the absence of social risk. Ghana’s courts and police have shown willingness to prosecute inflammatory religious speech under public order and incitement provisions even without a blasphemy law on the books, precisely because the underlying harm the risk of communal violence is what the law is actually built to prevent.

The West African Case Study: What Happens When the Law Falls Silent

To understand why Ghanaian authorities are moving quickly and why the National Chief Imam felt compelled to intervene publicly in the parallel case of Imam Masud Abdullah, it helps to look north and east, to a country where blasphemy accusations have repeatedly outrun the law itself.

In Kano State, Nigeria, a Sharia court sentenced musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu to death by hanging in August 2020, after he shared song lyrics on WhatsApp that were judged blasphemous toward Prophet Muhammad. He had no legal counsel at trial. A mob burned down his family home before his arrest. More than five years later, his case is still winding through Nigeria’s court system, having been overturned, ordered to retrial, and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court a case that human rights advocates say illustrates how a codified blasphemy law, once weaponized, can trap a person in the legal system indefinitely, with the possibility of state execution always hanging over the outcome.

More devastating still is what happened when the law was entirely bypassed. In May 2022, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a 200-level student at the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto, was dragged from a security room where staff had hidden her for her own protection, stoned to death by a mob of fellow students, and set on fire all over a voice note on a class WhatsApp group that some classmates considered blasphemous. Security forces were present and failed to stop it.

Two suspects were later arrested and eventually acquitted. The killing triggered further violence: rioters demanding the suspects’ release burned churches, looted Christian-owned shops, and besieged the palace of the Sultan of Sokoto, who had condemned the killing.

These cases are not offered here as predictions of what could happen in Ghana. They are offered as evidence of a pattern: once a society begins treating perceived insults to Prophet Muhammad as matters that individuals, rather than courts, are entitled to punish, restraint collapses quickly, and it collapses in a direction that is almost always fatal for the accused, regardless of what any court eventually rules. The gap between “the law is unclear” and “someone takes the law into their own hands” has, in Nigeria’s case, been measured in hours, not years.

Why Ghana Has Avoided Nigeria’s Trajectory So Far

Ghana’s relative insulation from this pattern is not an accident of geography. It rests on a set of practices that are more fragile than they look: religious leaders across faiths who publicly and swiftly condemn incendiary rhetoric from within their own ranks, security services that move quickly to detain rather than merely investigate, and a national habit reinforced repeatedly by figures like the National Chief Imam, Sheikh Osman Nuhu Sharubutu of insisting that religious grievances be routed through “lawful and constitutionally recognized processes” rather than street justice. Sheikh Sharubutu’s swift condemnation of Imam Abdullah’s comments, and his acknowledgment of the imam’s subsequent public apology, was not simply damage control.

It was a demonstration of exactly the mechanism that failed catastrophically in Sokoto: a religious authority publicly closing the loop before the grievance could be exploited by anyone looking for a pretext.

This is the context Apostle Adjei should understand. His refusal to apologize is, on paper, a legal and personal choice he is entitled to make, and due process should indeed be allowed to run its course, as his church’s statement rightly urges. But in a region where the line between an unresolved religious grievance and communal violence has proven to be alarmingly short, an unresolved grievance is not a neutral position. It is a live wire. Every day that the matter remains publicly unresolved with one side’s cleric having apologized and the other’s declining to be a day in which the asymmetry itself becomes the story, and a story that can be repurposed by actors with far less interest in “peace” than either camp appears to have.

The Stakes Beyond the Courtroom

Ghana’s police and judiciary will determine whether Apostle Adjei’s remarks meet the threshold for prosecution under existing public order or electronic communications law. That is a legal question with a legal answer. But the more consequential question the one Nigeria’s experience makes brutally clear is not whether the state can prosecute him. It is whether Ghanaian society’s informal machinery for defusing religious grievance, the machinery that has so far kept the country markedly safer than several of its neighbors, will hold if public figures on either side treat an apology as a concession rather than as the basic maintenance work that religious pluralism actually requires.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.

International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP

[email protected]
+233-555-275-880

References

• The Ghana Report, “Police arrest 2 over alleged inciting comments about Prophet Mohammed” https://theghanareport.com/news/police-arrest-2-over-alleged-inciting-comments-about-prophet-mohammed/
• Graphic Online, “Imam and pastor arrested by police over inciteful comment on Prophet Mohammed” https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/imam-and-pastor-arrested-by-police-over-inciteful-comment-on-prophet-mohammed.html
• Graphic Online, “Chief Imam warns preachers against provocative language in sermons” https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/chief-imam-warns-preachers-against-provocative-language-in-sermons.html
• Digital Watch Observatory, “Ghana’s Cybersecurity Act 2020 (Act 1038)” https://dig.watch/resource/ghanas-cybersecurity-act-2020-act-1038
• Parliament of Ghana Institutional Repository, “Criminal Offences Act, 1960 – ACT 29” https://repository.parliament.gh/bitstream/handle/123456789/2434/ACT%2029.pdf
• BBC News, “Nigerian singer sentenced to death for blasphemy in Kano state” https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world-africa-53726256
• ADF International, “Yahaya Sharif-Aminu’s Supreme Court Outcome Will Shape Religious Freedom in Africa” https://adfinternational.org/commentary/yahaya-sharif-aminu-supreme-court-religious-freedom
• USCIRF, “Yahaya Sharif-Aminu” https://www.uscirf.gov/religious-prisoners-conscience/forb-victims-database/yahaya-sharif-aminu
• Human Rights Watch, “Student in Nigeria Murdered Over Blasphemy Allegation” https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/16/student-nigeria-murdered-over-blasphemy-allegation
• Media Foundation for West Africa, “Nigeria: Lynching of student over blasphemy accusation deplorable” https://mfwa.org/nigeria-lynching-of-student-over-blasphemy-accusation-deplorable/
• Christianity Today, “Nigerian Christians Protest Deborah’s Death” https://www.christianitytoday.com/2022/05/deborah-sokoto-nigeria-christians-protest-blasphemy-killing/
• The Conversation, “Blasphemy in Nigeria’s legal systems: an explainer” https://theconversation.com/blasphemy-in-nigerias-legal-systems-an-explainer-182479