Former Vice President and New Patriotic Party flagbearer, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has called for the release of Salomey Awiti Bafoh, the Techiman-based nurse remanded into police custody over allegations that she abetted the publication of false news.
He issued the demand in a written statement after the Adentan Circuit Court refused her bail application on Thursday, 17 September 2026, and ordered her detention for two weeks.
Dr Bawumia frames the case as a test of free expression and of whether Ghana’s laws are applied evenly, arguing that the deployment of intelligence operatives against a private citizen carries consequences for the wider democracy.
Prosecutors, by contrast, have placed the matter squarely on national security grounds, telling the court that investigations are still running.
What The Court Heard
The nurse, aged 40, was arraigned before a court presided over by Mrs Angela Attachie and charged with abetting the publication of false news, an offence brought under sections 20(1) and 208 of the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29). She pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors allege that she acted as a liaison for Barbara Asantewaa Kodua, the United Kingdom-based TikTok personality known as Ghana Jollof, whose account has drawn attention for its criticism of President John Mahama and First Lady Lordina Mahama.
One of the videos under investigation is said to have contained threats to overthrow the government and to burn the country. The state further alleges that she recruited others to redistribute the material online, and that money remitted to her from the United Kingdom was shared with those recirculating the videos.
Bail was refused on the argument that the case touches national security and that investigations continue. She is scheduled to reappear before the court on 30 September 2026.
A Night Arrest In Hansua
The circumstances of her arrest have driven much of the public reaction. According to accounts from her family, three people who identified themselves as National Security operatives arrived at her home in Hansua, within the Techiman Municipality, at about 11:30 pm on Sunday, 13 September 2026, and took her away.
Her brother, Antwi Francis, said he was told to sit down and keep quiet when he asked what she had done. The family then spent hours trying to establish where she had been taken.
The Bono East Regional Police Command and the regional National Security Secretariat initially said they held no records of the operation, deepening concern about how the detention was handled before she appeared in court four days later.
Bawumia’s Intervention
Dr Bawumia described the account of the arrest and remand as very worrying to read, and placed the case within a broader argument about the direction of the state. “This is not the Ghana we want to build,” he said.
He extended that into a commitment about how security institutions would operate under his leadership. “I can assure Ghanaians that when given the opportunity, our intelligence agencies will not be reduced to chasing citizens for insulting the President or anyone else.”
He separated that position from any endorsement of abusive speech, restating his disavowal of a politics of insults and calling for decorum across the political space. The remedy, in his argument, lies in political conduct rather than prosecution, because “free speech, as unpalatable as it may be sometimes, is the foundation of our democracy.”
The sharper accusation in his statement concerns even-handedness. He contends that the government has applied the law selectively, allowing some citizens to insult without consequence while others face jail depending on who the target is.
“Some citizens can insult and walk freely, and others are jailed because the government doesn’t like the target of their insults,” he said, before appealing for the release of the nurse and of others facing similar charges.
Defence Questions The Detention
That line of criticism found an echo in court. Defence counsel Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah, who is also the Member of Parliament for Manhyia South, questioned why his client should remain in custody when the state had told the bench that the person operating the account is based abroad.
The imbalance he describes now sits at the centre of the case. A mother of three is in custody while the principal figure named by prosecutors remains in the United Kingdom.
What happens on 30 September will show whether the prosecution can substantiate the collaboration and financing it has alleged. Until then, the case stands as a proxy for a larger argument about where criticism ends, and criminal liability begins in Ghana’s online space.
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