Ghana’s Cybersecurity (Amendment) Bill 2025: A Threat to Privacy, Innovation, and Digital Freedom.
ABSTRACT:
Ghana's proposed Cybersecurity (Amendment) Bill 2025 aims to enhance cyber resilience but raises concerns about privacy, innovation, and digital freedom. The Bill grants excessive power to the Cyber Security Authority, threatens privacy and digital rights, and could stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. The article highlights nine key issues, including overreach of authority, threats to privacy, rising costs for businesses, and risks to democracy and digital freedom. It calls for Parliament to refine the Bill, ensuring it balances security with freedom and accountability.
INTRODUCTION
The draft of the Ghana Cybersecurity (Amendment) Bill, 2025, is being presented as a significant step forward for the country's cyber resilience. In reality, it seems to update the cybersecurity law, which gives the Cyber Security Authority (CSA) more powers to combat cybercrime and handle new technologies like AI, blockchain, and IoT.
However, a closer look reveals a worrying reality: the Bill, in its current form, could do more harm than good. Rather than empowering the digital economy, it risks centralizing power, stifling innovation, and undermining the very freedoms it claims to protect.
Upon reviewing the Ghana Cybersecurity Amendment Bill 2025, I identified several areas that warrant attention and propose the following recommendations to enhance its effectiveness.
THE SINGLE AUTHORITY HAS TOO MUCH POWER.
The draft legislation confers on the CSA law enforcement-like powers, including arrest, search, and prosecution, under the Attorney-General’s authority. While faster responses to cybercrime are vital, placing policing and prosecutorial power in a regulatory agency blurs legal boundaries and invites abuse.
Realistically, an innocent system administrator could have their data or devices seized under suspicion of cybercrime with little opportunity for legal recourse. This concentration of authority reduces accountability and could easily be politicized, especially in cases involving journalists or activists.
Recommendation: Dealing with this problem requires the powers of investigation, prosecution, and regulation to be separated. The CSA should focus on oversight, standard-setting, and coordination, leaving enforcement to established law enforcement and judicial bodies.
- THREATS TO PRIVACY AND DIGITAL RIGHTS.
Under the Bill, the CSA can access and seize digital data with limited judicial oversight. Although meant to support investigations, this opens the door to mass surveillance and privacy violations.
In practice, this could mean that a journalist’s emails or a citizen’s private messages may be accessed under vague definitions of 'national security'. Such overreach undermines trust in digital systems and discourages free expression online.
Recommendation: Introduce stronger data access protocols, requiring full judicial authorization and independent oversight before digital searches are conducted. Ghana’s Data Protection Commission should also be involved in ensuring these actions respect citizens’ rights.
- DEMOCRACY AND DIGITAL FREEDOM AT RISK.
The surveillance capabilities, as per the Bill, should be used for their proper objective - to catch the dissenters or opposition who might be abusing their power. For example, being forced to decrypt messages might be a violation of people's rights, and it may contribute to the rise of a culture of fear on the internet.
Cybersecurity is supposed to be the tool that empowers the citizens, not the one that controls them. Security, as one of the democratic elements, should be in balance with freedom in a digital society.
Recommendation: The Bill should consider the incorporation of human rights impact assessments. Each enforcement power should be evaluated for its potential infringement of digital rights and freedoms.
- RISING COSTS FOR CYBERSECURITY-RELATED BUSINESSES.
The Bill mandates registration, certification, and annual fees for Critical Information Infrastructure (CII) owners, cybersecurity practitioners, and service providers. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), already struggling with economic pressure, may find compliance costs unbearable.
Imagine a small fintech startup forced to pay multiple registration and audit fees, plus a percentage of its revenue to the Cybersecurity Fund. These costs discourage entrepreneurship and could drive innovation abroad.
Recommendation: Complying with the law should be different for different companies, so the CSA should implement a tiered compliance model based on company size and risk exposure. Offer financial incentives or grants for SMEs to meet cybersecurity standards instead of punitive levies.
- INNOVATION UNDER THREAT.
The Bill requires CSA certification for revolutionary technologies such as AI, blockchain, and IoT. While oversight is necessary, if the control is too tight, it may result in the slowdown of innovation.
For instance, an AI developer who is working on a healthcare analytics tool may have to wait for months before getting the CSA certification, by the time, the idea or product may already be outdated. Ghana may eventually lose the race for digital leadership and become just a follower of global trends.
Recommendation: Establish innovation sandboxes where startups can try out their new ideas under the supervision of the CSA, but without having to go through full regulation right away. Encourage innovation while maintaining national security.
- WEAK OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY.
The CSA will be in charge of collecting fines, running the Cybersecurity Fund, regulating sectors, and enforcing laws - all under one organization. This situation presents a potential conflict of interest where fines, instead of being used as a compliance instrument, may become a means of generating revenue from the penalized entities.
Such scenarios have led to the misuse of funds as well as regulatory capture in several other places. Transparency will hardly be maintained in the absence of independent oversight.
Recommendation: Form an independent board responsible for overseeing cybersecurity to supervise CSA actions, audit the Fund, and facilitate transparency in the issuing of fines and the performance of enforcement actions.
- FINANCIAL MISMANAGEMENT RISKS.
A portion of Ghana’s Communication Service Tax, as well as Corporate taxes, would be redirected to the Cybersecurity Fund. While this sounds progressive, it could drain public funds from essential sectors like education or health if not managed transparently.
Without robust audit mechanisms in place to oversee how the Fund is used, the Fund will, in reality, be a source of bureaucratic expansion rather than improving national cyber defenses.
Recommendation: There has to be an annual public audit of the Cybersecurity Fund, published for citizen review, and clearly outline how funds are used for national cyber development purposes.
- CRIMINALIZING ETHICAL HACKERS AND FREELANCERS
The Bill, which provides that unauthorized cybersecurity service providers are to obtain CSA accreditation, may result in the loss of independent experts who offer such services and have a crucial part in the discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities.
Freelance hackers who are "white-hat" in nature and are based worldwide greatly contribute to the identification of weak points in public systems. Ghana's policy, however, may have the opposite effect, thus resulting in blind spots in national security.
Recommendation: Introduce a "safe harbor" clause that covers ethical hackers who, in a proper manner, report vulnerabilities, and make the process of accreditation easy and accessible for freelancers and students.
- OVERLAPPING JURISDICTION AND BUREAUCRACY.
The Cybersecurity Authority’s extended mandate overlaps with those of the Ghana Police Cybercrime Unit, National Intelligence Bureau, and the Attorney-General’s Department. This redundancy could create confusion and turf wars, leading to delayed investigations.
Recommendation: Define clear roles and coordination frameworks among these agencies. In the national cybersecurity enforcement arena, the CSA should not act as a competitor but rather as a coordinator.
THE WAY FORWARD.
Ghana’s journey toward digital transformation is commendable. However, true cybersecurity is not built on control; it’s built on trust, transparency, and collaboration.
Before passing the Cybersecurity (Amendment) Bill, Parliament should:
- Redefine CSA’s role to prevent overreach.
- Strengthen privacy and due process safeguards.
- Support innovation through inclusive regulation.
- Involve stakeholders — tech companies, universities, and civil society in shaping the final framework.
Cybersecurity should protect citizens, not intimidate them. Ghana has a golden opportunity to build a digital future rooted in freedom, innovation, and accountability, but only if this Bill is refined, not rushed.
For your review, please find the link to Ghana's Cybersecurity (Amendment) Bill, 2025, below.
Your insights, recommendations, and feedback are invaluable in shaping the discourse. Kindly share them in the comments section, and let’s keep the conversation going.
By: Emmanuel Ntow
Cybersecurity Enthusiast
Comments
Post a Comment