Fellow Ghanaians, I trust this letter finds you well, though I confess I did not write it to make anyone comfortable.
By now you have seen the video. Yakubu Mohammed, MP for Ahafo Ano South East, stood before a group of visiting schoolchildren, singled out a young girl, told her she was beautiful, and announced to the room that he would marry her when she grew up, that she was, from that moment, his wife.
The room laughed. He smiled. The clip spread. Within hours, an apology arrived, careful and unqualified on paper, and we were told, gently, to move on. I will not move on, and I do not believe you should either, because before we talk about culture or intention, we need to talk about what this moment actually put at risk.
The first reason this matters is that Ghana already has a measurable problem with treating girls as brides in waiting, and it is not a fringe problem.
Ghana’s National Strategic Framework on Ending Child Marriage 2017-2026 tells us roughly one in five girls in this country is married before the age of eighteen. That is not an abstraction. It represents hundreds of thousands of Ghanaian girls whose childhoods were exchanged for someone else’s idea of when they became ready for marriage.
When a Member of Parliament jokes, in a public building, in front of cameras, about a primary school pupil becoming his wife one day, he is not stepping outside that reality. He is speaking comfortably inside it, using the exact language that, for far too many girls in this country, is not a joke at all but a preview of what actually happens to them.
The second reason this matters is that Ghana also has another measurable problem with sexual violence against girls, and the numbers should stop every one of us mid laugh. National survey data has found that close to thirty eight per cent of girls between fifteen and nineteen years old report having experienced at least one act of sexual violence.
In a single year (2020), Ghana’s Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit recorded over a thousand cases of defilement, and researchers who study this issue consistently note that reported cases are widely understood to represent only a fraction of what actually happens, because shame, stigma, and fear keep most victims and their families silent.
We are not talking about a society with an occasional bad actor. We are talking about a society where a great many girls already live with the daily possibility of being treated as objects of adult desire, and where a public official’s joke about marrying a child, made from a position of real power and broadcast to the nation, does not float above that context.
It lands directly inside it, and it tells every girl watching that even in the one building meant to represent the seriousness of her country, her body can still become the punchline.
Once we are honest about that context, the apology looks very different. An apology offered only after a video goes viral is not remorse. It is damage control. Nothing about that comment was whispered in doubt or said in a private moment he later regretted.
It was said in full view of a room of adults, to laughter, by a man entirely comfortable saying it. The discomfort came from the rest of us, once the internet refused to let it go. That is not conscience.
That is calculation, and it does not undo the fact that in a country already struggling with this scale of harm to girls, we have collectively agreed to treat the incident as a minor lapse in judgment rather than a symptom of the very culture that produces the numbers above.
Some have rushed to explain the comment away as culture, an old, teasing tradition, misunderstood by a public too quick to take offence. I reject that defence, plainly. A tradition that requires a child’s silence and a room’s laughter to survive is not being honoured here.
It is being used as a shield. Culture explains where a phrase came from. It does not excuse where it lands, and given what we now know about how many Ghanaian girls are actually married as children or exposed to sexual violence, we can no longer afford to let that distinction go unexamined.
This is why the third piece of this conversation matters as much as accountability itself. We need sustained public education that helps Ghanaians separate genuine cultural heritage from the convenient cover we have built around it.
We cannot continue old customs around playful betrothal which were formed in contexts very different from a national broadcast, a public office, or a primary school excursion. Naming that difference honestly does not require us to abandon our traditions. It requires us to stop hiding behind them whenever a powerful adult says something to a child that would alarm us instantly if a stranger said it on the street.
I ask that Parliament impose real, visible consequence, not merely a statement but an actual sanction with weight. I ask that every institution that hosts children adopt a safeguarding protocol with teeth, so that no elected official is ever again alone with a microphone and a child and nothing but his own judgment standing between them.
I ask our media, our chiefs, and our churches to invest in the kind of public education that teaches the difference between an inherited custom and a modern excuse. And I ask every Ghanaian reading this to stop being the laughter in that room.
The next time a man tells a little girl she will be his wife one day, do not smile. Say something, because the silence in that Chamber was not neutral. It was permission and given what the data already tells us about what happens to girls in this country when permission goes unchallenged, none of us can afford to grant it again.
We say our children are our future. He showed us, on camera, exactly how much some of us still believe that. Now it is our turn to show him otherwise.