By: Victoria Hamah
Sitting in the Great Hall of the University of Ghana on the evening of July 10, 2025, I felt both intellectually provoked and personally stirred by the words of Prof. Justice Nyigmah Bawole. His inaugural lecture, titled “Our Corruption, Our Ethics, Our Public Administration: Wicked Citizens, Wicked Problems, and Stagnating Development,” was not just an academic exercise; it was a mirror held up to our collective national conscience. But for me, it was also painfully familiar. His words peeled back layers of a reality I have lived: the politics of ethics is always gendered, and in Ghana, corruption is not only a systemic ailment but a selectively weaponised charge, particularly against women who dare to rise.
As I listened, I couldn’t help but reflect on how closely my own experience as a woman in politics intersected with the themes of the lecture. And more deeply, how my political story was misrepresented, sensationalised and violently mediated, speaks to a broader architecture of gendered exclusion, media distortion, and weaponised morality in Ghana’s political life.
In 2013, I became the subject of national controversy following the leak of a private conversation. That incident has followed me ever since, not as a moment of human fallibility, but as the defining frame through which my political legitimacy has been judged. A woman with ambition became a symbol of moral decay. I was not charged. But I was tried by headlines, pundits, a reactionary public hungry for spectacle, all anchored by a corporate media agenda, and I was politically executed.
This experience cannot be reduced to scandal; it is part of a larger gendered political economy of representation. What happened to me was not simply about “corruption.” I am not corrupt. It was about how narratives of corruption are selectively deployed to silence, shame, and delegitimise women who enter political spaces with power, confidence, and visibility.
Through a feminist political economy lens, it becomes clear that my case reflected the intersection of gendered power, capitalist media logics, and elite political competition. In Ghana, as in many postcolonial democracies, political space is a fiercely contested site of symbolic and material power. Women who enter that space are policed not just for what they do, but for daring to be there at all. We are subjected to surveillance of our bodies, our speech, our private lives, and then judged by standards constructed to render us illegitimate.
My story was further distorted by fake news, amplified by digital media ecosystems where truth is less valued than virality. Once the label of “corrupt” was affixed to me, no nuance or counter-narrative could survive the onslaught. In this, I became an archetype, a cautionary tale deployed to remind women what happens when we step too far out of line.
But then I would like to ask this: Why was my voice so easily drowned? Why was my ambition so threatening? Why was my gender the lens through which my entire political being was interpreted?
These questions point us to the historical-material roots of women’s political exclusion. In colonial and postcolonial Ghana, the reconfiguration of traditional governance eroded pre-existing female power structures, such as the authority of queen mothers and female elders, replacing them with colonial masculinised bureaucracies. Today’s political culture, though modernised, remains shaped by that legacy: a system that offers women symbolic inclusion but structurally denies us legitimacy.
What we need, then, is not just to revisit individual cases like mine, but to re-narrativise women’s participation in politics. We must confront the embedded masculinism of our political systems, challenge the media’s complicity in moral gatekeeping, and build a gender-conscious accountability framework, one that critiques power without reproducing patriarchy.
Prof. Bawole’s lecture reminded us that Ghana’s developmental stagnation is rooted in ethical contradictions. But I would add: we cannot talk about ethics in public life without talking about whose ethics count, and whose violations are punished. Until we acknowledge that the moral panic around corruption is often a theatre of power, not justice, we will continue to mistake spectacle for substance and gossip for governance.
My experience is not unique, but it is instructive. It tells us that the politics of corruption is deeply entangled with the politics of gender, and that we cannot reform one without confronting the other.
Today, I continue to advocate for a new political culture that does not demand perfection from women and tolerance for men. One where ethics is not a weapon but a shared responsibility. One where my story is not remembered as a scandal, but as a warning against a politics that punishes women for simply being political.
In that Great Hall, as I listened to Prof. Bawole, I did not just hear a lecture, I heard a challenge, and I accept it, not in shame, but in defiance, so that my story as a woman in politics will not be silenced by a society that prefers its women to be obedient and ornamental.
