Assin South Member of Parliament and former Deputy Minister for Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, has accused the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government of subtly embedding provisions in the 2025 Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) report that could pave the way for advancing an LGBTQ+ agenda in Ghana.
In a post on social media on Friday, January 16, 2025, Rev. Ntim Fordjour shared a link to the full CRC recommendations presented to President John Dramani Mahama in December 2025, highlighting pages 104 and 105 as evidence of what he described as a “constitutional bedrock being implicitly laid for NDC grand and covert LGBTQ agenda!!!”
The highlighted sections of the report propose amendments to Articles 15, 28, and 30 of the 1992 Constitution to enhance protections for children’s bodily integrity. Specifically, the recommendations call for:
– Amending Article 28 to grant every child the right to bodily integrity, including freedom from irreversible, non-consensual medical or surgical interventions unless strictly necessary to preserve life or prevent serious and immediate harm. It emphasizes that the child’s best interests should override social, cosmetic, cultural, or expediency-based justifications for such procedures, with particular protections for intersex children against medically unnecessary “normalizing” interventions before they can provide informed consent.
– Harmonizing Article 15 to recognize that non-consensual, non-therapeutic medical alterations of a child’s body constitute a violation of human dignity.
– Amending Article 30 to provide heightened constitutional protections for children, including intersex children, against non-therapeutic, coercive, or irreversible medical interventions. This includes requirements for informed consent based on the child’s age and capacity, independent medical review, and compliance with rights-based standards.
The report also mandates Parliament to enact legislation establishing accountability frameworks, including consent standards, complaint mechanisms, and sanctions for violations in medical, custodial, educational, and institutional settings.
The accusation comes amid heightened sensitivities around LGBTQ+ issues in Ghana, following the Supreme Court’s 2024 upholding of anti-LGBTQ+ laws that criminalize same-sex activities and advocacy.
Rev. Ntim Fordjour, a senior pastor and lead proponent of the anti-LGBTQ+ bill, has been vocal on the matter.
This is not the first time Rev. Ntim Fordjour has raised alarms about alleged NDC efforts to introduce LGBTQ+ educational content covertly. Just days ago, a similar controversy erupted over a Senior High School (SHS) Physical Education and Health elective teacher manual published by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA).
The manual initially defined “gender identity” as “a person’s deeply felt internal experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth,” noting that gender could include male, female, or a blend of both.
The definition sparked widespread outrage, with critics, including Rev. Ntim Fordjour, accusing the NDC-led Ministry of Education of smuggling an LGBTQ+ agenda into the curriculum to promote “alien diabolical and very vile LGBT propagation.”
In response, Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu directed NaCCA to recall all 736 printed copies of the manual and revise it to align strictly with biological definitions of sex.
“There should be no ambiguity whatsoever regarding the definition of a man as a man, a woman as a woman, and sex as biological sex at birth,” the Minister stated during a teachers’ training workshop in Tamale.
NaCCA issued an apology, admitting the original content did not reflect Ghanaian values and norms, and released an updated online version emphasizing that sex is biological and not identity-based.
The Minority in Parliament, now in opposition, denied introducing the gender identity concept, clarifying that no such elements were added in the 2024 manual and attributing the issue to inherited frameworks.