Hundreds of New Patriotic Party supporters, lawmakers and party leaders marched through Accra on Thursday, accusing the ruling National Democratic Congress government of undermining democracy, restricting free speech and targeting political opponents. They wore red and black, then carried their complaints straight to the Supreme Court, Parliament and the Presidency. The message was blunt. Power at the top is squeezing people below.
Who Has the Power
The protest came under the theme “Democracy Under Attack,” and the NPP tied it to a year of mounting anger over court decisions, arrests of opposition members and the removal of former Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo. The party said those developments raised concerns about Ghana’s democratic institutions. That’s the official language. On the street, it looked like a warning that the machinery meant to manage dissent is being used to discipline it instead.
The NPP also pointed to the first anniversary of a helicopter crash that killed eight people, including government officials. The party used the date as a marker for how much has changed since then, and how quickly the political class turns grief into another battlefield for legitimacy. The marchers didn’t stay quiet about the hierarchy. They put their accusations in front of the institutions that claim to stand above the fray.
Who Gets Crushed
The opposition said authorities have used security agencies to intimidate its members. It also accused the government of limiting freedom of expression through prosecutions of social media users over offensive or false content. Those are the people at the bottom of the chain: party members, online users, ordinary people whose speech gets pulled into the state’s net when the apparatus decides order matters more than expression.
The NPP criticized the acquittal of former MASLOC CEO Sedina Tamakloe-Attionu, saying the decision showed unequal treatment in the justice system. The Court of Appeal overturned her 10-year sentence after ruling that prosecutors failed to prove their case. The legal system speaks in the polished voice of procedure, but the opposition is saying the rules don’t land the same way for everyone. Some people get the full weight of the courts. Others walk.
The party has organized similar demonstrations before, including protests over the removal of former Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo and the arrest of one of its regional leaders. Repeated marches like these show a familiar pattern: when institutions close ranks, people are pushed back into the streets to make themselves heard.
What They Call Order
The government rejected the allegations and said it remains committed to the rule of law. It said security agencies are only enforcing laws to protect public order. That’s the language of the state when it wants obedience dressed up as neutrality. The NPP’s march, petitions and public accusations ran straight into that claim, with both sides speaking the vocabulary of legitimacy while the pressure lands on everyone else.
The party presented petitions to the Supreme Court, Parliament and the Presidency, a reminder that even protest in Ghana still has to knock on the doors of the institutions it’s challenging. The marchers used the tools available to them. The institutions answered with denials and legal language. Between those two positions sits the ordinary public, watching the same old struggle over who gets to define democracy and who gets policed for questioning it.