President John Dramani Mahama stood in Arusha on Monday and spoke in the language of principle.
As the first sitting Ghanaian president invited to address the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, he told fellow African leaders they had “nothing to fear” from a court designed to protect rather than persecute.
He invoked the memory of his own father, detained after the 1966 coup, forced into exile for thirteen years, to argue that no victim of injustice should stand alone. He declared that “without independent courts and respect for judicial decisions, rights become promises on paper.” He urged the continent to “step into its greatness.”
It was a remarkable speech. Personal. Principled. And, as a statement of where Ghana aspires to be, entirely welcome.
But human rights are not lived in Arusha.
For most Ghanaians and certainly for the journalist covering a fire scene in Kasoa, or the cameraman at a galamsey mining site, or the reporter filing from an Ashanti region polling station, justice lives or fails in the streets of their own country.
And it is there that the President’s eloquence must be tested against a far more uncomfortable record.
The Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) has been sounding the alarm with increasing urgency throughout the Mahama administration’s tenure.
The GJA President, Albert Kwabena Dwumfour, described the situation as one of the most dangerous periods for press freedom in Ghana’s recent history.
The Walewale incident
Solomon Kwame Kanaluwe, North East Regional Correspondent for Media General and Secretary of the GJA North East Region, on Sunday, January 26, 2026, at around 3:00 pm, had parked his motorcycle near a roadside shop in Walewale to buy basic items when he was approached by military personnel already in the area.
Without provocation, two soldiers struck him on the back with sticks and canes approximately four times, claiming he had parked at an unauthorised location.
It gets worse. Even after Kanaluwe identified himself as a journalist, the assault reportedly continued — with the soldiers explicitly stating they did not care about his profession.
He was then detained for more than four hours, and evidence of the harm caused to his body — photographs he had taken on his own phone was destroyed.
Military officers subjected him to severe beatings using sticks, leaving his body with lacerations and wounds.
The Military’s Response — and Its Problem
One soldier reportedly showed Kanaluwe a section of what he described as the military code of ethics on his phone, claiming that when personnel are on duty, and someone obstructs them, they are permitted to subject that person to “minor punishment.”
Soldiers appear to have believed they had codified authority to beat a civilian over a parking dispute.
GAF launched an investigation but immediately contextualised the incident by citing heightened insecurity in the North East and Upper East Regions due to repeated attacks on public transport resulting in deaths and injuries, framing that reads as pre-emptive mitigation rather than accountability.
An unidentified military commander reportedly issued an informal apology, but the Media Foundation for West Africa rejected this as insufficient and demanded a comprehensive, transparent investigation.
The Kasoa Incident: A Case Study in Impunity
On January 5, 2026, just weeks before President Mahama boarded his flight to Arusha, Samuel Addo, a journalist with Class Media Group, was physically assaulted by officers of the Ghana National Fire Service while covering a market fire at Kasoa New Market in the Central Region.
According to Addo’s own account, corroborated by video footage widely circulated on social media, he identified himself as a working journalist before approximately ten fire service officers approached him, seized his phone, held his neck, pulled his arms behind his back and assaulted him.
He was also robbed of GH₵10,200 in cash that was later unrecovered. His injuries required medical attention. He had committed no offence. He was doing his job.
The Ghana National Fire Service initially denied the assault, with its Public Relations Officer suggesting that Addo had been “recording without permission” and claiming the footage depicted officers confronting a suspected thief.
The GJA rejected this account entirely, demanding the arrest and prosecution of those responsible, as well as the immediate removal of the GNFS PRO for conduct it described as unfit for public communications. The government’s Communications Minister condemned the incident. An investigation was opened.
As of this writing, there have been no prosecutions. There have been no public findings. The investigation, like so many before it, has quietly receded.
This is the pattern that President Mahama must confront, not just incidents, but what follows them.
The Ghost of Ahmed Suale
No honest reckoning with press freedom in Ghana can avoid the name Ahmed Hussein Suale Divela.
On January 16, 2019, the investigative journalist, a key member of Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ Tiger Eye team and lead investigator behind the landmark “Number 12” football corruption exposé, was shot dead in traffic in Madina, Accra. He had received public threats. His identity had been deliberately exposed. Two unidentified gunmen on a motorbike carried out the killing.
Seven years later, not a single person has been convicted of his murder.
Six suspects were arrested in February 2019 and released by March for lack of evidence. By 2021, the Attorney-General’s office admitted it had received no prosecution docket from the police.
In March 2025, under the new Mahama administration, a suspect was finally arrested, a development that deserves acknowledgement. But an arrest, seven years after the killing, with no trial concluded, is not justice.
It is a beginning. President Mahama, who, while in opposition, pledged publicly to pursue this case if elected, now holds the full machinery of state. The test is not whether he makes promises. He has made them already.
The test is whether, this time, they are kept.
The Media Foundation for West Africa has noted plainly that every day of impunity in the Suale case is an incentive to future attackers.
That logic applies with equal force to every unresolved case that follows it.
Recognition Without Remedy
In his State of the Nation Address earlier this year, President Mahama acknowledged the rise in attacks on journalists. That acknowledgement matters. It signals awareness at the highest level.
But recognition is not a remedy. And the remedy is not prevention.
Remedy requires visible consequences: swift investigations with public findings, prosecutions where evidence exists, and credible sanctions against state actors who turn force on the people they are sworn to protect. Prevention requires systemic reform, training, oversight, and a culture within security agencies that treats the camera not as a threat to be extinguished, but as a feature of democratic life.
What Ghana has instead is a cycle. An attack occurs. Condemnations follow. Investigations are announced. Months pass. The investigation loses momentum. No findings are published. No sanctions are applied. Another attack occurs.
The GJA has documented this cycle with exhausting precision. “Over time, we have condemned the attacks and impunity against journalists — the people who promote our democracy,” said GJA President Dwumfour. “Yet, our security has been weakened.”
The Wider Question
If journalists with institutional affiliations, professional networks, legal resources, and national platforms face risk with uncertain protection, what of the citizen who has none of these things?
The market trader photographing misconduct on her phone.
The student documenting a police operation. The detainee in a rural station who has no lawyer and no headline.
The strength of a constitutional democracy is not measured by the eloquence of its speeches abroad, nor by the quality of its continental commitments. It is measured by the predictability of restraint at home.
It is measured in whether state actors, at every level, understand that their authority carries limits and face genuine consequences when those limits are crossed.
Ghana’s 1992 Constitution is explicit.
Media freedom is not a privilege. It is structural.
It exists precisely so that power may be examined without fear, and so that the public retains sight of what is done in its name.
What We Are Asking For
RANA welcomes President Mahama’s commitment to continental accountability. We welcome his personal testimony of what state abuse costs families, and what institutions built to check it are worth.
We take him at his word when he says, in Arusha, that “no individual and no institution should stand above the law.”
We are asking, therefore, that this principle be applied at home with the same clarity and the same urgency.
Specifically, we call on the Mahama administration to:
First, publish the findings of the investigation into the January 5, 2026, assault on Samuel Addo, and take appropriate disciplinary and prosecutorial action against those found responsible.
Second, provide a transparent public update on the Ahmed Suale murder prosecution, including a clear timeline for trial proceedings.
Third, direct the Inspector General of Police and relevant security service heads to issue and enforce standing orders that protect the press in the execution of its constitutional role, with clear consequences for violations.
Fourth, establish a public register of journalist attacks and their investigative outcomes, so that civil society and the public can track accountability over time.
The President knows, from his own family’s experience, what it costs when the state turns on those who observe and speak. That knowledge is not a rhetorical resource. It is a responsibility.
The African Court is in Arusha. The work is in Accra.
Rights Accountability Network Africa (RANA) is an independent civil society organisation monitoring state-led human rights abuses in Ghana.
RANA publishes verified incident reports, accountability briefs, and policy submissions. Our work is governed by the principles of accuracy, independence, and the rule of law.
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