Against the gods: For once, let’s have the courage

By Hene Aku KWAPONG

If I sound like an economist and an engineer, wandering into sociology, as Bernard Avle characterizes my thinking, it is because economics and engineering have always been, at heart, a study of how societies choose to architect and organize themselves.

The case of Shafic Osman v. The Board of Governors of Wesley Girls Senior High School gives me exactly that opportunity to articulate the central paradox of the Ghanaian republic.

The Wesley Girls case is a moment in Ghanaian public life where a seemingly narrow legal dispute has become an X-ray of a much deeper malaise. It has pulled back the curtain on contradictions that have simmered since independence, and which have their roots in an even longer historical memory. Let me take this in three parts: the law, the history, and the troubling cultural psychology that frames the religious debate in Ghana.

First, the legal puzzle.

How did this matter jump directly to the Supreme Court. Ghana’s constitution provides for original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in any matter involving the enforcement or interpretation of constitutional provisions, especially fundamental rights. Counsel for the student framed the issue not as a school disciplinary matter but as a constitutional question about freedom of religion and equal treatment in a public institution. Once you pitch the case at that level, Ghana’s legal architecture allows you to bypass the lower courts. This is unusual but not unprecedented. In the 1990s and early 2000s, several high-profile public interest cases followed exactly this route. In other words, the leapfrogging says less about judicial procedure and more about the way litigants increasingly cast social conflicts as constitutional identity struggles rather than administrative disputes.

Now, the deeper story.

Here is a nation born out of the convergence of disparate tribes, each shaped by migratory flight, conflict and adaptation. Yet, instead of forging a strong civic identity anchored in shared rules and a common national story, Ghana allowed external religions to become the primary arbiters of public emotion and personal meaning. Christianity and Islam did not simply arrive.  They filled the vacuum left by a weak national integration project.

That precolonial fragmentation meant that local identities were always fragile and adaptive. The collapse of older political orders under the pressures of the Atlantic economy and the militarization it triggered only further eroded indigenous systems of meaning. Then came the colonial state, which imposed an external bureaucracy and an external religion that both acted as solvents on already-vulnerable identities.

The Wesley Girls case exposes this weakness in its rawest form. A question about a student’s right to pray becomes a referendum on belonging, history and existential loyalty.

The tragedy is not that Christianity or Islam arrived. These faiths, like technologies or institutions, are neutral until refracted through local social structures. The tragedy is that when they arrived, Africans had not consolidated a coherent civic identity strong enough to domesticate these religions. Europe tamed its religion and turned it into a catalyst for intellectual rebellion. America tamed it and turned it into a philosophical engine for dissent and innovation. The Nordics tamed it by subordinating it to a social ethic of collective care. Even Latin America, for all its turbulence, fused Catholicism with a political consciousness of liberation.

Sub-Saharan Africa did not domesticate these religions. The religions domesticated the people. That is the uncomfortable truth. It produced societies in which theology substitutes for citizenship and emotional fervor substitutes for public reason. The Wesley Girls incident is a symptom of that: religion stands in for ethnicity, ethnicity stands in for insecurity, and insecurity stands in for the absence of a shared national story. You can almost see the line from fifteenth-century state collapse to the modern quarrel about hijabs in a Methodist school.

Finally, the cultural psychology.

What is happening is not that Ghana is uniquely intolerant. It is that Ghana, like Nigeria and much of the West African belt, has never completed the project of forging a national identity separate from imported religious identity. When citizens cannot see themselves as authors of their own norms, they outsource moral authority to external gods. And when the gods are external, they become absolutes rather than cultural tools. The result is paralysis. People defend the symbol, not the society. They treat religious difference as existential rather than procedural. You cannot build a modern plural republic on that kind of emotional wiring.

This is why the public discourse around the case feels strangely inflamed and strangely hollow at the same time. The nation inherited a constitutional framework meant to mediate pluralism, but the emotional infrastructure of pluralism never fully took root. The schools, which ought to be the laboratories for building that infrastructure, are instead the battleground.

My sense, speaking in the language of political economy, is that Ghana is facing something like a coordination failure. No group can unilaterally step back from the religious brink without risking status, and yet the entire society would be better off if everyone de-escalated. It is the same problem that weakens economic cooperation in many low-trust societies: every actor is trapped by the fear of being the only one to defect from old identities. Religion, because it is universal and portable, becomes the most convenient identity to cling to.

The Wesley Girls case will eventually receive a legal answer. But the cultural and historical question it exposes will not be resolved by a court ruling. Ghana needs a national narrative that precedes religion, not one that hides inside it. Until then, debates that elsewhere would be managed by institutions will here become contests over metaphysical belonging. That is the real cost of the failure to build a strong civic identity. It shows up not only in the economy, or in the politics, but in the quiet corridors of a secondary school in Cape Coast, where a single student’s prayer time has become a referendum on the soul of a nation.

The hard truth is this.

If Ghana is ever to avert a future implosion driven by religious contestation, the country will need a government willing to take a step that no political elite in postcolonial West Africa has had the courage to take: removing religious instruction from all public schools and public spaces. This is not an attack on religion. It is an attempt to rescue the republic from becoming the hostage of competing theologies.

Right now, public schools act as arenas where Christian and Muslim identities deepen rather than soften. They reproduce emotional loyalties that citizens then bring into public debate, often with absolutist certainty. When you give the state the role of validating religious practice in public education, you take a country with fragile social cohesion and hand it a lit match.

A modern republic should not do that. France learned it the hard way. India is learning it the hard way. Ghana can learn it the wise way.

If I were to win the Presidency of Ghana, my government would do three things:

First, it would purge religion from public schooling. No devotions, no religious instruction, no enforced rituals. The churches, mosques, and shrines can do that and should do that. The schools would teach civics, ethics, science and historical inquiry. They would train students to see themselves as citizens rather than confessional proxies. Religion would belong to families, communities and voluntary associations, not state-run classrooms.

Second, it would guarantee full freedom for any faith group to establish private schools that offer whatever religious worldview they wish, just as occurs in many liberal democracies. If you want a Methodist school that catechizes, build one. If you want a madrasa, build one. If you want a school dedicated to Kukumkama or ancestral philosophies, build one. But do not turn public institutions into battlegrounds of theological privilege.

Third, it would enforce a constitutional separation between public authority and religious symbolism in national life. Government events would be civil ceremonies, not liturgies. Public institutions would stop outsourcing moral authority to pastors or imams. And once that psychological line is drawn, citizens can begin to see one another as participants in a shared civic project rather than as vessels of rival gods.

This is not secularism as ideology. It is secularism as disaster prevention.

The Wesley Girls case is a symptom of a broader structural contradiction. Ghana wants to be a plural republic with a modern constitutional order, yet it refuses to build the emotional architecture that allows pluralism to function. When schools become the front line of religious identity, the society is knowingly planting seeds of future conflict.

Let me remind us again of our failure to domesticate the religions we adopted. Europe and America did not become modern because they were Christian. They became modern because they subordinated religion to the civic order. The power of the state, the marketplace and the research university eventually overshadowed the power of the church. Africa has done the reverse. It has placed religion at the center of public authority and left civic identity shallow and negotiable.

The result has been a society in which every dispute takes on metaphysical weight, because citizens are not arguing about rules but about cosmic loyalties. From a political economy standpoint, this is the single most dangerous condition a modern state can face. Countries do not implode because they are poor. They implode because the identities that ought to be mediated by institutions instead become unmediated sources of existential fear.

Ghana still has time.

What might one day save the country is precisely the reform I am suggesting. A government willing to face down the inevitable backlash and articulate a simple principle: a public school is where the nation is formed. It is not where the gods compete. The state’s role is to produce citizens capable of self-governance, scientific reasoning and peaceful coexistence. If a family wants a religious environment, the constitution already gives them the freedom to create it privately.

This is the kind of radical institutional clarity that could finally help Ghana escape its historical trap. It would not reduce the importance of faith in private life. It would simply prevent religion from hijacking the fragile work of building a nation out of many peoples who, until a century ago, shared no political destiny.

And perhaps, this is the only path by which Ghanaians, and indeed much of sub-Sahara Africa, might finally stop being enslaved by the gods they themselves have created, and start becoming authors of the civic future they claim to desire.

This is not our sword to die on.

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