Victoria Hamah (L) and Prof Bawole

Victoria Hamah, a former Deputy Minister of Communications, has said she was left painfully reminiscing on her past experiences as a woman in politics after sitting through Prof Justice Nyigmah Bawole’s gripping inaugural lecture.

Prof Bawole delivered his inaugural lecture, titled “Our Corruption, Our Ethics, Our Public Administration: Wicked Citizens, Wicked Problems, and Stagnating Development,” at the Great Hall of the University of Ghana on July 10, 2025, with some prominent Ghanaians gracing the well-packed occasion.

In his lecture, the Dean of the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS) touched on how corruption was crippling the state and called for a moral reset.

He further noted that true change must be rooted in shared societal morality and must not only be reduced to what he described as a “firefighting” effort.

The content of Prof Bawole’s lecture seems to have resonated deeply with Victoria Hamah, who took to her social media page to also share her thoughts, while looking at the gender perspective.

In a post on Facebook, Hamah, who sat through last Thursday's lecture, said the session “peeled back layers of a reality I have lived: the politics of ethics is always gendered.”

Using her experience as an example, the gender activist said, “In Ghana, corruption is not only a systemic ailment but a selectively weaponised charge, particularly against women who dare to rise.”

It would be recalled that Hamah lost her job as a Deputy Minister of Communications in November 2013 after her audio recording was leaked to the public.

On the leaked audio, she was alleged to have claimed she intended to make a $1 million fortune before retiring from active politics.

The issue put her in the national spotlight, and she was subsequently relieved of her post.

It’s been 12 years since that episode but Hamah, who is the founder and president of the Progressive Organisation for Women Advancement (POWA), believes she was a victim of the trend of weaponised corruption against women in Ghana’s politics.

Her Facebook post, which was titled “Framed by Power: Corruption, Fake News, and the Politics of Sexism - My Reflections from Prof Justice Nyigmah Bawole’s Inaugural Lecture” said the 2013 incident has “followed me ever since, not as a moment of human fallibility, but as the defining frame through which my political legitimacy has been judged.”

She further wrote, “A woman with ambition became a symbol of moral decay. I was not charged. But I was tried by headlines, pundits, a reactionary public hungry for spectacle, all anchored by a corporate media agenda, and I was politically executed.

“This experience cannot be reduced to scandal; it is part of a larger gendered political economy of representation. What happened to me was not simply about "corruption."

"I am not corrupt. It was about how narratives of corruption are selectively deployed to silence, shame, and delegitimise women who enter political spaces with power, confidence, and visibility.”

Hamah added, “Today’s political culture, though modernised, remains shaped by that legacy: a system that offers women symbolic inclusion but structurally denies us legitimacy.

“What we need, then, is not just to revisit individual cases like mine, but to re-narrativise women’s participation in politics.

"We must confront the embedded masculinism of our political systems, challenge the media’s complicity in moral gatekeeping, and build a gender-conscious accountability framework, one that critiques power without reproducing patriarchy.”

Since taking a step back from active politics, Hamah has been heavily involved in women's empowerment through her organisation POWA, which holds conferences annually.

She is currently a Doctoral candidate at the University of Ghana Business School.

Hamah also recently spent two months in the Czech Republic on an Erasmus Exchange Programme at the Mendel University to enhance the competencies of her PhD research.

Last year, she was also selected for the Bergen Summer Research School organised by the University of Bergen in Norway, where she undertook a course in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education.

AM/KA

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