IMANI Africa Vice President Kofi Bentil has challenged Ghana’s proposed pornographic website identity checks, arguing the country’s cybercrime crisis deserves far greater policy attention.
Speaking on Newsfile, Bentil said the proposal by Communications Minister Samuel George to require age and identity verification before users can access adult content online misallocates digital policy resources at a time when Ghana faces serious and largely unaddressed internet fraud.
“Ghana is one of the capitals of international romance fraud,” he said, arguing that building bureaucratic infrastructure around pornographic access serves no meaningful public interest when financial cybercrime continues to harm thousands of victims.
Bentil maintained that determining what consenting adults watch online falls outside the proper role of government. He said shaping the values and digital behaviour of young people is a responsibility that belongs to families rather than state institutions.
He also raised concern about the practical consequences of tying pornographic access to identification documents. According to him, such systems rarely achieve their stated goals and instead create new bureaucratic channels that can be used to monitor and control citizens beyond their original scope.
Bentil placed the proposal within a wider historical pattern, arguing that state-led morality regulation has a consistent record of failure across different societies and political contexts. He said the government may be seeking to occupy moral high ground on the issue but warned that identity-based policing of personal choices is an approach that tends to overreach.
His comments add to a growing conversation around the policy’s implications for privacy, civil liberties, and the proper boundaries of digital governance in Ghana. The Communications Ministry has not announced a timeline for implementation.
