Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production in Ghana: An Interview with Chika C. Mba

MIASA Academic Coordinator Dr. Agnes Schneider-Musah interviews Dr. Chika C. Mba, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana and MIASA’s Principal Investigator for Human Rights, on issues concerning Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production in Ghana.
This discussion was part of a joint roundtable organized by MIASA and MECAM, titled “Academic Freedom and Research Ethics: Exploring Dynamics in Ghana, Tunisia & Germany” held on 10 October 2024 at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana. As a contribution to the 2024 German Science Year theme “Freedom,” the event provided a platform for lively discussions on key issues in academic practice.
Agnes Schneider-Musah (ASM): Chika, these days, Academic Freedom seems to be under threat globally, with higher education systems destroyed, scholars arrested, funding cut, university leaders fired, and in many places, dominant state ideologies are being promoted. What is the state of Academic Freedom in Ghana? How is it perceived and protected?

Chika Mba (CM): Well, first, it is important to note that the Ghanaian Constitution from 1992 mentions academic freedom once under what it calls ‘general fundamental freedoms’. In fact, the Ghanaian constitution actually lists academic freedom indirectly as one of the freedoms protected as part of the freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Still, I would claim that globally, the prognosis for academic freedom is not very great, and this strongly holds for Africa, and particularly also Ghana. I would go as far as to say that reactionary forces – both on and off campus – wish that the phrase ‘Academic Freedom’ would not even exist in the higher education lexicon or in national constitutions. This is because academic freedom is a special license that allows academics, researchers, and students to pursue the truth, including the truth that might be uncomfortable to those in power on campus and in government. For this reason, many academics in Ghana tend to avoid politically charged topics. A case in point is the reluctance to properly analyze and discuss issues around galamsey [illegal mining], its repercussions on the environment and society, the driving forces behind it as well as the ones who fail to prevent it. This is because engaging in disagreements or controversial topics might eventually negatively affect you – not because of the topic itself but because it might bring you into an uncomfortable space if it concerns somebody in a superior position – which could be political or academic. Thus, we are not necessarily interested in academic freedom unless we face threats or violations of these cherished freedoms in our corner of the office or when we find that our close colleagues are in trouble. Also, the constitution does not attempt to define academic freedom or spell out any consequences for its violation. These two factors taken together mean that in Ghana, academic freedom is not clearly defined, nor does it always attract serious repercussions when violated – whether by internal or external actors. For that reason, as a colleague at the University of Cape Coast once told me: What we have in our universities is academic peace, not academic freedom. There is a lot of self-censorship and that won’t change any time soon.
ASM: How has this attitude towards academic freedom that you have just described been influenced by the history of the Ghanaian universities?
CM: Academic freedom has had a chequered history in Ghana, from the era of presidents serving as chancellors to the imposition of structural adjustment policies on higher education. This difficult development is further accentuated by military interventions, as one would expect. Firstly, it is crucial to understand that institutional autonomy in higher education is a critical enabler and component of academic freedom, and this is where the problem lies. Institutional autonomy safeguards the corporate rights of self-regulation, which the state confers upon the university as an institution in the laws establishing it. So, it is actually the state that empowers the university with the autonomy that allows it a degree of financial autonomy; the free hand to admit students and award degrees among other institutional governance decisions. Historical accounts show that in Ghana, there have been shortfalls in both the conferment of autonomy and the wider practice of academic freedom, right from the moment colonial authorities established the University College of the Gold Coast (UCGC). The UCGC was merely an appendage of the University of London. It was managed in terms of its syllabus, examinations, and quality of teaching and administration by the University of London. All graduating students of the UCGC received their final certificates from the University of London. And of course, the power of the colonial authorities in education and knowledge production irked Ghana’s independence leader Dr. Kwame Nkrumah endlessly, as he sought the country’s self-determination on every front.
ASM: So how did the situation change once Ghana had achieved independence?

CM: In 1961, the University of Ghana Act was enacted, with Nkrumah as its first Chancellor. However, the condition of academic freedom did not necessarily improve for the university as Nkrumah and his government struggled to reconcile the dictates of academic freedom with his own pursuit of a cultural policy on education. Nkrumah was frustrated with university teachers who he believed were misusing academic freedom to serve other political ends. This 1964 quote from the Evening News, a newspaper run by Nkrumah’s party sums this up: “[The Universities] think they have been ordained by some metaphysical powers to lord it over the common people, not knowing that the masses can uproot them from their ‘academic freedom’, that is the freedom to act contrary to the wishes and manifesto of the party and government, and freedom to conspire with Western capitalist agents against the African revolution. The subversive groups among the lecturers, those who conspired with reactionary students one moment, and then pretended to hold them in check, we know them all, and shall CRUSH them”.1 Nevertheless, the university system in Ghana has been resilient and has eventually outlived the era when the President made themselves chancellor of the university and used every means possible to undermine institutional autonomy. Still, I would say that first, the colonial nature of the university and, secondly, the problems in decolonising the university have led to the crisis in the perception of academic freedom, which persists up to date.
ASM: So, without institutional autonomy, there is no academic freedom. What then is the way forward to achieve and maintain institutional autonomy in higher education in Ghana?

CM: First, we need autonomy as in the relationship between the state and the university, as well as within the university structures themselves. As long as internal issues within the university cannot be discussed openly, because it may go against you and seriously affect your position and career, we do not have that freedom. This becomes clear when we look at this recent piece on the university system in Ghana and the issue of academic freedom co-authored by Gyamera and Burke in 2018, who had to anonymise the names of the Ghanaian universities they investigated, clearly out of fear of the unknown2; This is by far not a purely Ghanaian issue, but I would say it is accentuated here. I want to paraphrase Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr and Dr Kwame Nkrumah here, who at various times, aver that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are defining features of the university, without which it would make no sense to name any institution of learning as such. Even in the worst of times, what Sawyerr describes as the ‘relatively fragmented organisational structure’ of the university system, ‘the diffusion of decision-making power among its many semi-autonomous units, and the substantial amount of authority and initiative vested in individual academics, especially the professoriate, over important matters,’ helps the university to maintain a degree of autonomy and academic freedom: ‘This dispersion of authority and decision-making power gives the university unusual flexibility and strength in its dealings with the outside world, and a capacity to absorb and diffuse outside pressure, changing as little as possible in the process’.
The other major challenge to institutional autonomy that I see is the fact that the state is not funding universities adequately in Ghana, meaning that academics depend on external sources for funding research. In many cases, this means they have to produce what is marketable to Western donors, which is a problem of globalisation. Every African country should establish its own National Research Fund, as South Africa has done. African states should find ways to reward scholars and universities for research output and innovation appropriately. We shouldn’t belabour this point. Ghana is still spending less than 3% of its GDP on education, whereas South Africa spends more than the UNESCO‘s recommendation of 6% of a country’s GDP. Financial autonomy will eventually also be our own strategy against extractivism in the making and the dissemination of knowledge, something frequently carried out by the West, consciously and unconsciously—and this is where we need to be.
ASM: Apart from the necessary autonomy in scientific work, how can academia, both in and outside of Africa, address these historical and structural asymmetries in global knowledge production, particularly concerning marginalised perspectives and voices?

CM: I think, the decolonial turn in African Studies is already taking care of that. Mine is an open invitation to scholars – and not just Africanists in particular, but anyone else interested in a more democratic space in scholarship – to join the decolonisation train. And this should not only be about insisting on African inclusion. What we need is to create an academic space that allows the germination and development of diverse perspectives on the same issues and problems, without which human knowledge will remain incomplete, and we will be unable to solve some of the most pressing human problems.
ASM: Thank you very much, Chika!
About the Authors
Dr. Chika C. Mba is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, where his teaching and research span the broad domains of African philosophy, decolonial thought, human rights, and global justice. His work centres the understanding of Africa and Africans in key debates in philosophy and the humanities more broadly, raising challenging questions to hegemonic discourses about human nature, global justice, (global) culture and human rights. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA)’s thematic focus on “Human Rights”.
Dr. Agnes Schneider-Musah has served as the Academic Coordinator of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana since January 2019. A trained linguist, she received her doctoral degree from the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2015 with a thesis on English in Ghana. Before moving to Accra she was a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Ghana and coordinator of the DFG-funded research training group Frequency Effects in Language.
- Gyamera, O. G. and Burke, P.J. 2018. Neoliberalism and curriculum in higher education: a post-colonial analyses. Teaching in Higher Education, 23.4: 450-467, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2017.1414782. ↩︎
- Likely date: early 1964. From ‘Shame unto Colonial Lecturers’ in Evening News run by the CPP, Nkrumah’s political party, in Appiagyei-Atua (2017) cited from Kwesi Yankah “Academic Freedom: Myths, Realities, and Boundaries,” Lecture presentation to students of the University of Ghana (29 January 2010). ↩︎
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Agnes Schneider-Musah (July 24, 2025). Academic Freedom and Knowledge Production in Ghana: An Interview with Chika C. Mba. Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa - Blog. Retrieved December 11, 2025 from https://miasa.hypotheses.org/4681



