Samia Nkrumah, former Member of Parliament for Jomoro has pleaded with President Akufo-Addo to not assent to the recently passed Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill which proscribed various jail terms for members of the LGBT community in Ghana and their allies.
Samia Nkrumah, daughter of Ghana’s first President Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah described the Bill as harsh and unfair and stood on these as her reasons for telling President Akufo-Addo to not sign the Bill into Law
“I pray the President does not sign, does not assent to it. I believe it is a brutal, harsh, unjust law and we do not need it. We have laws against rape pedophilia, against all these situations that people seem to be terrified of gays from and I think we need to educate ourselves”, Samia Nkrumah noted in an interview with Daily Graphic.
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She continued: “But most importantly, I am against anything that brings division that foments discord against the people of Ghana. We are all Ghanaians and we need to protect and take care of each other”,
Another person of influence whose voice has been added to the call on the President to not sign the Bill into Law is celebrated standup comedian Kweku Sintim-Misa (KSM).
KSM in an interview with Bola Ray said the Bill is a hard one: “If what I am hearing is true, then this is too harsh because I really, and maybe this is just by the way, but all the way in school, I had homosexual classmates and these were decent people. What they would do in their privacy is not my problem.”
KSM Noted further: “I think there is a lot of hypocrisy too. I know married couples, different situations where a married man is a husband at home with the wife and even has children and he still sleeps with men. You know how men have side chicks, if it is a man then it is a side what?.
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“It happens and women who are married who have their husbands nicely also have girls outside. All I am saying is that lets not by so hypocrital about it and saying that this can never happen in Africa. Eiiii. Where are Africans from? Mars? You know, so maybe say this would not be tolerated in Africa but don’t pretend this does not even exist in our continent it is coming from some white men.”
He added: “I am being real. I had a white friend. He was homosexual and the sad things he was telling me about the homosexual friends he had at the University was just mind boggling. He told me that his homosexual activity is in the. If it is something that we want to discourage, let us discourage it but let’s not pretend that it has never happened before and un-African and something like that.”
The stance taken by both Samia and KSM is not different from the position taken by the Reverend Matthew Kwasi Gyamfi, the President of the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference, that there is the more reformative and corrective sanctions in addressing the issues at stake.
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“We think that in the case of this particular law and the way it is being implemented, being placed in prison as the punishment that they have chosen, it is not going to solve the problem. Because you see if you round up same-sex people and you know our prisons, they are going to end up in the same room and what is going to prevent them from going through these activities in the prison?
“And you are not going to put them there forever because they are going to be there for three months to six months. And then they practice this and come out as more experts at it than when you sent them there. Then you release them back into society. So, what is going to happen?”, Reverend Matthew Kwasi Gyamfi noted in a recent interview with Citi FM.
