Professor Emerita Takyiwaa Manuh, a Senior Fellow at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) and one of the country’s most respected academics and human rights advocates, has described Ghana’s ongoing anti-LGBTQ campaigns as “manufactured crises” and “moral panic” fueled by foreign influence and orchestrated alliances between U.S.-based and local groups.
In an interview aired on JoyNews TV with Kojo Yankson on Saturday, October 18, 2025, Prof. Manuh said the campaigns did not arise organically from Ghanaians but were deliberately created and amplified by external forces.
“We have always had gays and lesbians in our society,” she explained. “That’s why I call it a manufactured crisis, a moral panic — that followed the holding of a conference here because there are people who have made it a crusade. So now, not only did the missionaries come; we have new missionaries, mostly white, working with people here to save us from ourselves.”
She added that it was a manufactured crisis because “it did not emanate naturally from the people” but was driven by coordinated anti-rights actors seeking to spread fear and moral panic.
The conference she referred to was the African Regional Conference of the World Congress of Families, held in Accra in October and November 2019. The event was organized in partnership with U.S.-based groups such as Family Watch International and Family Renaissance, as well as others including CitizenGo alongside local collaborators such as the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values and Advocates for Christ Ghana.
These organizations, she noted, are widely recognized as part of the anti-rights, anti-gender, and anti-LGBTQ movement, promoting narratives that threaten equality, human rights, and democratic values across Africa.
Addressing claims by anti-LGBTQ groups that their actions aim to “protect children,” Prof. Manuh said Ghana already has laws to safeguard minors and punish offenders.
“If people cross the line, deal with them,” she said. “But people open a private space for themselves and suddenly the whole society is on them. Then you ask them, how many gays and lesbians are there in Ghana? They don’t know. So how do they threaten people?”
She criticized the hypocrisy of moral panic against queer people, pointing out that the same energy is not applied to tackling pressing social issues such as teenage pregnancy and defilement—most of which, she emphasized, are perpetrated by heterosexuals.
Prof. Manuh also condemned attempts to link her and other academics, including Professor Audrey Gadzepko, to the controversial Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill (widely known as the anti-LGBTQ bill). She revealed that some proponents have vowed to punish human rights defenders even more harshly than LGBTQI+ people themselves.
“I don’t think that LGBT people are the ones preventing anything from happening in Ghana,” she said. “They’re not the ones polluting our rivers, preventing people from getting jobs, or being corrupt. They’ve never asked for anything. They just want to be left alone to live their lives. And then you come up with a hateful kind of law?”
She further criticized U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration’s “war on gender ideology,” describing it as racially charged and part of a global attempt to export intolerance and roll back gender and human rights progress.
Prof. Manuh concluded by emphasizing that protecting the rights of minorities is fundamental to democracy.
“Even if the majority have their say,” she said, “the minority should also feel protected and have their rights.”
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