By Charles Prempeh*
The University of Ghana, the country’s premier institution of higher learning, has operated since the late 1940s with a broad mandate to promote rigorous scholarship, teaching, and service to the nation. This mandate is inseparable from the Ghanaian community, for it is ultimately Ghanaian citizens whose sweat and sacrifice sustain the university. Accordingly, the university’s teaching and non-teaching staff, administrators, and governing council have a duty to ensure that the institution’s operations align with the cultural, religious, economic, and political aspirations of Ghanaians. The privileges enjoyed by the university’s dons are therefore inseparably tied to the obligations they owe toward the people of Ghana.
However, the University of Ghana appears to have taken a troubling turn toward what can be described as self-imposed cultural confusion. On 21 November 2025, GhanaWeb published a story titled: “University of Ghana has changed its statutes to admit LGBTQ+ activities – Foh Amoaning alleges.” The statement is attributed to Mr. Moses Foh Amoaning, a distinguished Ghanaian citizen who has worked closely with political leaders, traditional authorities, clergy, and the general public to protect the frontiers of the natural family against what he and several others, including myself, views as the subverted logic of ideological globalism.
Because the family is the fundamental unit of society, serving both as a bulwark against deviant behavior and as the crucible of human civilization, any perceived threat to it will naturally attracts and beckon public attention, especially in an era when the world appears to be losing its moral compass. The leadership of the University of Ghana are certainly undeniably aware that since 2021, Ghanaians have become very aware about an attempt by a select cultural elites and their counterparts in the Western world to impose deprecatory sexual culture on the country. That said, the University of Ghana’s leadership has rejected what it calls Foh Amoaning’s false allegations.
Yet rather than offering a culturally grounded, context-sensitive response, the university appears to have missed an opportunity to demonstrate the virtues expected of the nation’s foremost institution of knowledge. In attempting to exonerate itself, the university in its response published by GhanaWeb on 24 November 2025, under the title, “‘Our statutes do not promote LGBTQ+ activities’ – UG clarifies”:
“The changes in the Statutes merely involved replacing gender specific pronouns such as ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘she’ or ‘her’ with gender-neutral terms such as ‘they’ and ‘theirs’, and additional linguistic adjustments made to represent both male and female in order to eliminate the need to continuously state he or she/him or her etc. in the Statutes.”
The statement continues:
“The revisions are consistent with developments in the English language over the past two decades, where singular ‘they/their/them’ has become widely accepted in reputable academic, legal and religious texts. For instance, in the 2011 New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, ‘they/them’ is used for a singular antecedent, as in James 4:17: ‘If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.’”
The people of Ghana cannot be submerged into what appears to be the university’s unreasonable cultural confusion. The dons at the University of Ghana know very well that words are not arbitrary; they carry meaning, intention, and social function. In her professorial inaugural lecture titled, “Discourse of our Time: Power, Norms of Language Use, and Identity Formation”, held at the University of Cape Coast on 9 April 2024, Prof. Dora Francisca Edu-Buandoh sagaciously illustrated how language can be used deceptively with the classic example: “Have you stopped stealing? ”—aquestion that is impossible to answer without implication.
Thus, the University Ghana’s use of the word “merely” in its statement reveals more than it seeks to conceals. What is the university running away from—its own shadows? Why is the university downplaying a culturally sensitive and enchanted issue with a word that suggests triviality? The use of “merely” hints at a possible culture of intellectual deception or epistemic suicide. Is the university unaware that the singular “they” in contemporary ideological battles is not a neutral linguistic development, but part of a broader cultural project aimed at reshaping social reality?
My first encounter with such cognitive, cultural, linguistic dissonance was at a conference in East Africa, where a participant’s name tag read “They.” The individual appeared biologically male but behaved in a manner associated with females. The confusion created by the pronoun “they” compounded what already seemed like an imported ideological tension. I could not suspend my common sense to participate in the absurdity of referring to one person as “they.”
Returning to the University of Ghana: are the women holding high-profile positions in the university suddenly uncomfortable about being addressed as “she”? Maybe I should now report on a hypothetical visit by the female Vice-Chancellor as follows:
“When the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana visited my school at Aboabo LA, they offered suggestions to students on how they could gain admission to the University. They further advised the teachers to guide students to uphold shared societal values.”
Or should we continue writing as we always have:
“When the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana visited my school at Aboabo LA, she offered suggestions to students on how they could gain admission to the University. She further advised the teachers to guide students to uphold shared societal values.”
The proper and logical use of language is a mark of intelligence; for which reason one does not grow weary of clarity simply because it requires repetition.
Is it also not the case that the university’s invocation of the NIV Bible only deepens the contradiction? While some English translations use singular “they,” the Bible itself remains entirely clear and overwhelmingly consistent about gendered relations and roles. Its authors—guided by the Holy Spirit, not ideologically funded institutions—communicated unambiguously about what it means to be a biological male and a biological female. This is something that even children (including Hans Christian Andersen’s character in The Emperor’s New Clothes) could readily tell. Maybe it is true that ideologically skewed education could skew one’s perception of reality. Thus, could the university’s appeal to James 4:17 ultimately betrays the university’s attempt to mask and obfuscate its self-imposed cultural deception?
The people of Ghana are not confused about the difference between a biological male and a biological female. The university cannot manufacture an imagined linguistic crisis and impose gender neutrality/agnosticism as the solution. It must remember that the “gown” and the “town” share a collective responsibility to protect marriage as a divine-cultural mandate and the family as the foundational unit of society.
*Charles Prempeh, PhD, Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural and African Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi-Ghana.Culled from December Issue of PAV Magazine
