Open letter to President Mahama, Vice President Opoku-Agyemang and NDC leadership: Justice for Obuasi SHTS girls

Dear Mr President, Madam Vice President and leaders of the NDC,

I write to you not as an adversary, but as a citizen who once believed that the phrase “social democratic” meant something more than a campaign slogan. I write because the events of the past week have made it impossible to remain silent.

The sexual misconduct allegations against the headmaster of Obuasi Senior High Technical School involving 19 female students are not merely a criminal matter. They are a moral test of your government. And thus far, the response has been lackadaisical, reactive and, in the case of the Vice President, disturbingly belated.

When investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni’s documentary, Inside the Dreaded Headmaster’s Bungalow, exposed the allegations, the party’s Functional Executive Committee first directed the accused, Zakaria Abdulai, to step aside from the Juaben constituency chairmanship race. Then, within days, the party reversed itself and cleared him to contest, citing the “presumption of innocence” and “the timelines of the ongoing electoral process”. It was only after public outrage that the party suspended its Amasaman Communications Officer, Daniel Nortey, for trivialising rape on live television.

This is not principled leadership. It is crisis management. The signal sent to every girl in Obuasi and to every survivor of sexual violence in Ghana is unmistakable: when political convenience collides with your dignity, convenience wins. The signal being sent is that victims who are suffering may be discouraged from speaking up by what is happening today.

Madam Vice President, you are the first woman to hold your office. That is a historic achievement, and it is not lost on the women of this country. But history is not a shield from accountability. Some organisations argue that you are “the Vice President of Ghana and not just the Vice President for women and girls”. They insist that your gender should not confine your leadership to women’s issues and that criticism of you is disproportionate.

They are right about one thing: no woman should be reduced to her gender. But they are dangerously wrong about the political reality that put you in office. Madam Vice President, you did not win the sympathy of women voters by accident. You won it because your presence on the ticket promised representation; a promise that the highest office in the land would finally feel the weight of women’s lived realities. Women voted for you not because they expected you to be a “women’s officer”, but because they believed your gender would inform your judgement on issues that disproportionately affect them, such as rape, domestic violence, child defilement and the everyday indignities that too often go unspoken.

To now position yourself as a neutral national leader, above the fray of gender, is to betray that promise. You cannot collect the political capital of women’s sympathy and then claim neutrality when women’s bodies are the battlefield. The argument by some organisations that you are “Vice President of Ghana, not for women” is technically true and politically dishonest. It is a sophisticated way of saying that the first woman in your position will be judged by the same standards as the men who preceded her, which is precisely the problem because those standards have failed women for generations.

Mr President, your party’s response to Obuasi reveals a deeper disorder: the belief that the only real accountability is electoral. Polls and public commentary are treated as noise to be managed until the next vote. But elections are not a licence to govern without scrutiny. They are a mechanism for accountability, and that is only one of many. Public outrage, the media’s questions and the protests of civil society are not obstacles to your mandate. They are the tools by which a democracy checks power between elections.

Until Ghanaians go to the polls again, public commentary is one of the checks on your government’s conscience. And that conscience, on Obuasi, has been found wanting.

It is my humble appeal, Mr President, that you direct the Criminal Investigations Department to expedite its probe and ensure that no political consideration interferes with justice for the 19 girls of Obuasi SHTS in the alleged rape cases.

I humbly appeal again to Madam Vice President, Her Excellency Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, to break your silence, not with another call for “due process”, but with a clear, unequivocal condemnation of sexual violence and a concrete commitment to survivor support. Use your office to convene, to demand and to protect. That is not the work of a “Vice President for Women”. It is the work of a Vice President for Ghana.

And I call on the NDC to remember that, with so much happening in the last month, I believe it is too early to be comfortable. You made a promise to the vulnerable. Please, do not trade their pain for political advantage.

The girls of Obuasi are watching. So are the women who voted for you. So is history.

Long live the President and the Vice President, and long live Ghana.

Rebecca AbafumFormer Organising Secretary, Ghana Association of Writers