The writer
During a school civic-education visit to the Parliament of Ghana, Yakubu Mohammed, MP for Ahafo Ano South East, singled out one primary school pupil among her visiting classmates.
He asked her name, told her she was beautiful, and declared that when she grew up he would marry her — announcing to the group that she was now “his wife.”
The moment was filmed and spread nationally. Following days of public backlash from journalists, a gender activist, and a human rights advocate, Mr. Mohammed apologized, admitting the remarks were inappropriate and had caused distress to the child, her family, and the public.
That apology is not the end of this. It is the minimum, and treating it as sufficient lets an institution off the hook for something bigger than one man’s bad joke.
Why “Sorry” Is Not Accountability
An apology is a private act of contrition. It does nothing to establish that Parliament — the institution that invited this child onto its premises for civic education — takes its duty of care toward children seriously.
A child was placed, by design of an official programme, in front of a sitting lawmaker who used his position to make her the object of a marriage joke in front of her peers. That is an institutional failure, not just a personal one, and it demands an institutional response:
- Referral to Parliament’s Privileges Committee. Conduct unbecoming a Member — particularly conduct directed at a child during an official parliamentary programme — should trigger the same disciplinary machinery Parliament uses for other breaches of decorum. An apology offered to the press is not a substitute for a formal ethics finding.
- A public, recorded reprimand from the Speaker’s office. Leadership needs to state, on the record, that this conduct violates the standards expected of Members, not leave it to individual activists and commentators to carry that message alone.
- A safeguarding review of parliamentary school-excursion programmes. If children can be brought onto the floor or into proximity with individual MPs without a chaperoning or conduct protocol, that gap needs to close immediately — with clear rules on what MPs may and may not say to visiting minors, and a reporting channel for teachers and parents if something like this happens again.
- Mandatory child-safeguarding training for MPs and parliamentary staff who interact with school visits. This should not be optional or symbolic; it should be a standing condition of participating in outreach programmes involving minors.
- Direct, private support for the child and her family — including access to counselling — offered by Parliament itself, not left to the family to seek out on their own after being thrust into a national news story without their consent.
A press apology addresses the MP’s public image. It does not address what the child experienced: being made, without warning or consent, the punchline of an adult’s joke about marriage, in a room full of her classmates, by a person whose position was supposed to make her safer, not more exposed.
Naming the Harm Precisely
This is not really a story about one embarrassing comment. It is a story about what happens when a position of institutional trust is used to plant an idea in a child’s mind that she is old enough to be evaluated as a future wife.
Ghana has spent years running public campaigns against child marriage; a lawmaker joking that a nine-year-old “is now his wife,” inside the very building where laws against child marriage are made, is not a harmless slip — it is the same script campaigns have been trying to dismantle, delivered from a position of authority a child cannot push back against.
Commentators have already said as much: a gender activist has called the remarks reflective of a “low moral standard” and demanded Parliament sanction the MP directly; a human rights advocate has criticized the comments for reducing a girl to her appearance rather than her potential.
Those are not overreactions. They are the correct scale of response to a lawmaker sexualizing a child inside a national institution.
What This Article Is Asking For
Not outrage for its own sake, and not a personal character verdict on Mr. Mohammed. A concrete institutional response:
- A formal ethics referral and outcome, made public.
- A binding safeguarding protocol for all future school visits to Parliament.
- Mandatory training, not just a press statement.
- Real support offered to the child and her family, on Parliament’s initiative — not contingent on them asking for it.
An apology closes a news cycle. It does not protect the next child who walks through those doors.
By Obaa Yaa Frimpong, Chairperson, NPP-USA Branch, Aspirant, National Vice Chairperson
