Ghana’s Civic Identity Crisis: Unpacking the Wesley Girls Controversy

The recent Shafic Osman v. The Board of Governors of Wesley Girls Senior High School case has brought to the forefront a fundamental paradox within the Ghanaian republic. What might appear as a narrow legal dispute has, in fact, served as an X-ray, revealing a much deeper societal malaise. It has pulled back the curtain on contradictions simmering since independence, with roots stretching back even further in historical memory. This article will examine this complex issue through three lenses: the legal framework, the historical context, and the troubling cultural psychology that frames the religious debate in Ghana.

The Legal Puzzle: A Constitutional Question

The journey of this matter directly to the Supreme Court raises questions about Ghana’s legal architecture. Ghana’s constitution provides for the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction in cases involving the enforcement or interpretation of constitutional provisions, especially those concerning fundamental human rights. Counsel for the student skillfully framed the issue not as a mere school disciplinary matter, but as a profound constitutional question regarding freedom of religion and equal treatment within a public institution. By elevating the case to this constitutional level, Ghana’s legal system allows litigants to bypass lower courts. While unusual, this path is not unprecedented; several high-profile public interest cases in the 1990s and early 2000s followed a similar trajectory. This leapfrogging, therefore, speaks less to judicial procedure and more to a growing trend where social conflicts are increasingly cast as constitutional identity struggles rather than administrative disputes.

The Deeper Story: A Nation Undomesticated by Its Own Civic Identity

Ghana, a nation born from the convergence of disparate tribes, each shaped by migration, conflict, and adaptation, has struggled to forge a strong civic identity. Instead of anchoring itself in shared rules and a common national narrative, Ghana has allowed external religions—Christianity and Islam—to become the primary arbiters of public emotion and personal meaning. These faiths did not simply arrive; they filled a vacuum left by a weak national integration project.

Precolonial fragmentation meant that local identities were often fragile and adaptive. The collapse of older political orders under the pressures of the Atlantic economy and the militarization it triggered further eroded indigenous systems of meaning. The subsequent colonial state then imposed an external bureaucracy and religion, acting as potent solvents on already vulnerable identities.

The Wesley Girls case starkly exposes this foundational weakness. A seemingly simple question about a student’s right to pray transforms into a referendum on belonging, history, and existential loyalty.

The tragedy is not the arrival of Christianity or Islam. Like technologies or institutions, these faiths are neutral until refracted through local social structures. The real tragedy is that upon their arrival, African societies had not consolidated a coherent civic identity strong enough to domesticate these religions. Europe tamed its religion, transforming it into a catalyst for intellectual rebellion. America harnessed it as a philosophical engine for dissent and innovation. The Nordics subordinated it to a social ethic of collective care. Even Latin America, despite its turbulence, fused Catholicism with a political consciousness of liberation.

Sub-Saharan Africa, however, did not domesticate these religions; instead, the religions domesticated the people. This uncomfortable truth has produced societies where theology often substitutes for citizenship and emotional fervor replaces public reason. The Wesley Girls incident is a potent symptom: religion stands in for ethnicity, ethnicity for insecurity, and insecurity for the absence of a shared national story. One can almost trace a direct line from fifteenth-century state collapse to the modern quarrel about hijabs in a Methodist school.

Cultural Psychology: The Paralysis of Out-Sourced Moral Authority

Ghana’s situation is not one of unique intolerance, but rather a reflection of a nation that, like Nigeria and much of West Africa, has never fully completed the project of forging a national identity separate from an imported religious identity. When citizens cannot perceive themselves as the authors of their own norms, they tend to outsource moral authority to external gods. And when these gods are external, they become absolutes rather than cultural tools, leading to societal paralysis. People defend the symbol, not the society. They treat religious difference as existential rather than procedural. Building a modern, plural republic on such emotional wiring proves to be an insurmountable challenge.

This explains why the public discourse surrounding the Wesley Girls case feels simultaneously inflamed and strangely hollow. The nation inherited a constitutional framework designed to mediate pluralism, but the emotional infrastructure necessary for pluralism to truly flourish never fully took root. Alarmingly, schools, which ought to be laboratories for building this infrastructure, have instead become battlegrounds.

From a political economy perspective, Ghana appears to be facing a coordination failure. No single group can unilaterally withdraw from the religious brink without risking its status, yet the entire society would benefit from collective de-escalation. This mirrors the 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, being universal and portable, often becomes the most convenient identity to cling to.

While the Wesley Girls case will eventually receive a legal answer, the deeper cultural and historical questions it exposes will not be resolved by a court ruling. Ghana desperately needs a national narrative that precedes religion, rather than one that hides within it. Until such a narrative is established, debates that would typically be managed by institutions elsewhere will continue to devolve into contests over metaphysical belonging. This is the true cost of failing to build a strong civic identity, manifesting not only in the economy or 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 very soul of a nation.

Rescuing the Republic: A Call for Radical Institutional Clarity

The hard truth is this: if Ghana is ever to avert a future implosion driven by religious contestation, the country requires a government willing to take a step that no political elite in postcolonial West Africa has yet dared: 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.

Currently, public schools act as arenas where Christian and Muslim identities are deepened rather than softened. They reproduce emotional loyalties that citizens then bring into public debate, often with absolutist certainty. By entrusting the state with the role of validating religious practice in public education, a country with fragile social cohesion is handed a lit match. A modern republic should not engage in such practices. France learned this the hard way. India is currently learning it the hard way. Ghana has the opportunity to learn it the wise way.

A Vision for a Secular Civic Future

If the author were to win the Presidency of Ghana, the government would implement three key reforms:

• FIRST, it would purge religion from public schooling. This means no devotions, no religious instruction, and no enforced rituals. Churches, mosques, and shrines are the appropriate venues for such practices. Public schools would instead focus on civics, ethics, science, and historical inquiry, training 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, mirroring practices in many liberal democracies. If a Methodist school wishes to catechize, it can build one. If a madrasa is desired, it can be built. If a school dedicated to Kukumkama or ancestral philosophies is sought, it can be established. The crucial distinction is that public institutions must not be turned 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 cease outsourcing moral authority to pastors or imams. Once this psychological line is firmly drawn, citizens can begin to perceive one another as participants in a shared civic project, rather than as vessels of rival gods.

This approach is not secularism as an ideology, but secularism as disaster prevention. The Wesley Girls case is a symptom of a broader structural contradiction: Ghana aspires to be a plural republic with a modern constitutional order, yet it resists building the emotional architecture necessary for pluralism to function. When schools become the front line of religious identity, society is knowingly planting the seeds of future conflict.

It is imperative to remember Ghana’s failure to domesticate the religions it adopted. Europe and America became modern not because they were Christian, but 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, regrettably, has done the reverse, placing religion at the center of public authority and leaving civic identity shallow and negotiable.

The result is a society where 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 solely 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. The reform suggested—a government willing to face down inevitable backlash and articulate a simple principle: a public school is where the nation is formed, not where the gods compete—could one day save the country. The state’s role is to produce citizens capable of self-governance, scientific reasoning, and peaceful coexistence. If a family desires a religious environment, the constitution already grants them the freedom to create it privately.

This radical institutional clarity could finally help Ghana escape its historical trap. It would not diminish 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 common political destiny.

Perhaps, this is the only path by which Ghanaians, and indeed much of sub-Saharan 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 a sword to die on; it is a path to national liberation.

~ Hene Aku Kwapong, CDD Ghana Fellow, RE-IMAGINE GHANA