Fellow Ghanaians, there are people in this country who will never miss an opportunity to manufacture a crisis where none exists, who have developed a refined political instinct for taking the most straightforward and the most defensible regulatory decision and converting it into a religious grievance, a cultural attack, an existential threat to faith, because the traffic in religious tension is profitable and the appetite for it among certain constituencies is apparently inexhaustible. The current controversy over the Road Traffic Regulations 2026 and its prohibition on preaching inside moving commercial vehicles is the latest and perhaps most transparently manufactured example of this tendency, and it must be called out for its lack of logic.
Fellow Ghanaians, let us establish the basic facts, because the facts have been so thoroughly buried under the noise of manufactured outrage that many Ghanaians following this controversy may not even know what the law actually says.
The Road Traffic Regulations 2026, under Regulation 141, classifies religious preaching and street hawking inside moving public or commercial vehicles as a public nuisance, with violators facing fines or imprisonment. That is the law.
That is the full scope of what is being regulated. Preaching inside a moving trotro or bus is prohibited. Preaching in your church is not prohibited. Preaching in a mosque is not prohibited. Preaching in an open-air gathering is not prohibited. Preaching at a lorry park before passengers board is not prohibited.
The law applies to one specific context, inside a moving commercial vehicle, and that context alone, and the law applies to every religion equally: Christian preaching, Islamic preaching, preaching of any tradition or denomination, all of it prohibited in the same moving vehicle under the same regulation with the same penalties attached.
Fellow Ghanaians, and this is not even a new law, which makes the outrage even more difficult to take seriously. As far back as 2012, in the old Road Traffic Regulations, L.I. 2180, we had the same prohibition. It has been on the books for over a decade. The only meaningful difference in the 2026 version is that the penalties have been increased.
So pastors and some leaders who are mounting their pulpits this week to denounce this law as an attack on Christianity were not, as far as the public record shows, mounting those same pulpits in 2012 when the identical prohibition was first enacted. That selective outrage is not a principled defence of religious freedom.
Fellow Ghanaians, and the specific framing of this as an attack on Christianity, as though the law targets Christian preaching specifically or treats Christian preachers differently from any other religious practitioner, is not just misleading.
It is dishonest. It is the deliberate and calculated seeding of religious grievance in a society that our leaders are always telling us is a model of religious harmony, a harmony they apparently feel no obligation to protect when the alternative is a more inflamed and more mobilised constituency.
Every pastor who has gone before a microphone to suggest that this regulation is anti-Christian knows that it applies equally to Islamic preaching. They know it. They are choosing to omit that knowledge from their public commentary because the omission is more useful to them than the truth.
Fellow Ghanaians, in which part of the developed world are the countries we aspire to the standards of governance and civic organisation that those societies have achieved? In which part of the developed world that we aspire to emulate can a preacher board a moving bus or a moving train, open a Bible or a Quran, and begin delivering a sermon to a captive audience of commuters who did not consent to attend a religious service and cannot leave because they are in a moving vehicle?
In which city in Europe or North America or East Asia that we point to as models of development is that considered an acceptable use of public transport? It is not permitted anywhere that functions the way we claim to want it to function, because it is recognised universally as exactly what our law correctly classifies it as: a public nuisance, an imposition of one person’s religious practice on other people who have not asked for it and cannot easily escape it, conducted in a shared public space where the captive nature of the audience makes the imposition particularly objectionable.
Fellow Ghanaians, the word of God, for those who believe in it, and I certainly believe in the word of God, is not diminished by the absence of a trotro pulpit. Christianity has survived for two thousand years without the moving commercial vehicle as its primary instrument of evangelism. Islam has spread across the globe without the bus as its essential sanctuary.
The suggestion that preventing preaching in a moving vehicle represents a meaningful threat to the survival or the spread of any religion is so intellectually weak that it should embarrass the people advancing it. Churches abound. Mosques abound. Open-air spaces abound. Radio stations, television channels, social media platforms, street corners, market squares, all of them available for the proclamation of whatever faith the preacher carries. The trotro is not the last remaining avenue for the gospel.
Fellow Ghanaians, our religious harmony is real, but it is not indestructible, and the people who test its limits at every opportunity, who reach for the language of religious persecution at the slightest pretext, who are willing to inflame Muslim-Christian tensions over a nuisance regulation that applies identically to both faiths, are not defenders of religion.
They are its worst ambassadors, and they are playing with something fragile and precious that this country cannot afford to lose. We must say so loudly and without apology every single time they do it.
Enforce the law. Ignore the manufactured outrage. And protect the religious harmony that we have built over generations from the people who would tear it down for an audience.
