Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin has disowned a social media post in which he appeared to describe Ghana's anti-gay bill as a law that "makes their existence a crime, saying his account was compromised and the statement did not come from him.

The post, which circulated before being flagged and taken down, read: "A law that imprisons people for their sexual orientation or who they choose to love does not protect society. It simply selects a group of human beings and makes their existence a crime. That is a line no Parliament in the civilised world should cross."

Afenyo-Markin said his account had been compromised. No details about the nature of the alleged breach were provided.

The post and the denial

The denial might have been straightforward were it not for the fact that Afenyo-Markin has said versions of the same thing before. On the record. In his own name.

On November 28, 2023, in a TV3 interview, the then-Deputy Majority Leader said: "Personally, I don't think that somebody claiming to be a lesbian or gay should go to jail by virtue of that."

He repeated it in the same interview, unprompted: "Personally, I don't think that somebody claiming to be a lesbian or gay should go to jail by virtue of that."

On February 15, 2024, on the floor of Parliament, he argued that jailing people for their sexuality "would not be the solution" and warned that passing the bill with custodial provisions "will be retrogressive." He cited a prison visit during his law studies to argue that incarceration does not correct the conduct the bill sought to address — it deepens it.

He also authored a paper titled "The Case for Non-Custodial Sentencing and Plea Bargaining in Addressing Same-Sex Sexual Relationships, — arguing for a justice system that moves from punitive to restorative, grounded in what he described as the dignity of every person regardless of identity or conduct.

The deleted post did not say anything Afenyo-Markin had not already said on television, in Parliament, and in writing.

Three possibilities

The evidence points to three possible readings.

The first is that the account was genuinely compromised and the post was produced by a third party whose fabricated statement aligned, by coincidence, with Afenyo-Markin's own documented positions from 2023 and 2024.

The second is that the post was authentic and that the hacking claim was used to walk it back without a formal retraction.

The third is that Afenyo-Markin holds a personal conviction against criminalisation, has held it consistently, but leads a caucus whose institutional position ran in the opposite direction, and that the tension between the two is what the post, real or fabricated, has now placed on the record.

What the record shows

Afenyo-Markin cannot disown the TV3 interview, the parliamentary floor speech, and the academic paper, which already establish that he has, on multiple occasions and over multiple years, argued against jailing people for their sexual orientation.

Those statements are not in dispute.

If the deleted post said something he had never believed, it is a fabrication that happened to align with his own prior positions.

If it said something he does believe, the hacking claim becomes the document that requires explanation, not the post.

What comes next

The bill awaits transmission to President Mahama's desk. Speaking at Chatham House in London, Mahama flagged quorum concerns and procedural lapses in the bill's passage and outlined three options: assent, referral to the Council of State, or return to Parliament.

He said the bill still had "quite a while to go" before becoming law.

The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, also appealed to Members of Parliament (MPs) to revisit the decision that passed the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill.

He said the legitimacy, credibility and enduring authority of any law depended not only on the objective sought to be achieved but also on the integrity of the process by which that law was enacted. 

If the bill returns to Parliament for any reason, the debate over its criminalisation framework will reopen. Afenyo-Markin's documented positions, including the one he says was not his, will be part of that record.