In this article, I attempt to place the draft National Information Technology Authority Bill, 2025 [PDF], and the current state of Ghana’s “tech” community in the right context, to help us better understand what is happening, to propose what a more beneficial way forward may be, and perhaps shape how we respond to the current crisis.
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The Truth about the NITA Bill
To begin, I think its fair to understand that the NITA Bill is a power grab by the agency. It is a purely political move, for political purposes. All other concerns are window dressing.
It’s somewhat self-evident that any organisation will first seek to justify its existence, and then, (unless it is constrained by some greater power or principle) continue to perpetuate itself by gradually increasing the scope of its mandate and relevance over time. This is called “growth”, and “progress”, and its usually seen as a good thing. But sometimes, growth is cancerous.
The NITA Bill is quite literally this: Ghana’s National Information Technology Agency wants to become an “Authority”. It wants to assume more powers in the space in which it already plays. It wants to become more relevant to all participants in the tech space: companies and individual workers, as well as those whose lives these actors affect. NITA wants to be in the face of every Ghanaian.
This is not the first time a state agency has worked to achieve “Authority” status, and it will not be the last time. Unless it is constrained by some greater power (Parliament) or principle (fidelity to a certain kind of culture), NITA will always want to become an Authority. It will always seek more than what it already has.
NITA’s Perspective
Things begin to make sense when we look at this situation from the perspective of a typical government organisation. Among all government institutions, NITA is perhaps the closest to the tech space; “tech” meaning the community of mostly software engineers (this is important) and the broader ICT industry, including telecoms, cybersecurity, etc. If there’s any agency in government that could have a say in anything in the tech space, it’s going to be NITA.
Governments being what they are, proximity and the regulatory hammer go hand-in-hand; to be close to an industry is to ultimately have a say in what can be done by people within that space. This is true in many countries, but Ghana’s political culture potentially makes this even more toxic than it sometimes is.
Regardless, from the point of view of NITA, any increase in its regulatory power is a good thing. It is a sign of responsibility on their part to be seen as capable custodians of their neighbourhood. Hence, it should not surprise anyone that NITA will want to put forward such a bill. And even if this attempt fails, it should not surprise anyone that another attempt will be made by the same or other agency to achieve the same end.
This is the perennial risk for any facet of human life the government or other powerful institution is in contact with. There is the ever creeping shadow of control to contend with. This crisis is the latest salvo. Some blows have already landed hard in other sectors (see the recent ramping up of enforcement of the Postal and Courier Services Regulatory Commission Act, 2003, between 2019 and 2026) and as government agencies and authorities realise how much power the law gives them, such actions will only increase.
Government types — the sort of people who enjoy manning bureaucracies and all the managerial palaver that comes with it — abhor governance vacuums. They sniff out gaps in society and immediately fill in the blanks with a new clause, or act, or whatever.
There’s a strain of legal purism that cannot abide the existence of any aspect of human life that isn’t covered by some manner of legal framework. It is an approach to life and industry that is clashing with another radically different philosophy. This conflict is at the heart of the current crisis.
Understanding the Calls for Regulation
Many people who have spoken for or against NITA’s attempt to turn all ICT work in Ghana into a credentialed profession are right to draw equivalences to the medical, legal and some financial professions.
Some of NITA’s spiel insists that their move is to “professionalise” the space; to add a layer of “seriousness”, an air of the respectable, to ICT work. You know, that sort of thing with other professions that flaunt their white or black coats and wigs, their LinkedIn-style string of credentials appended to their name to show their power level, membership car stickers etc.
More seriously, NITA pushes the goal of increased “accountability” and discipline and vouched-for credibility of tech workers to the public. This part has some basis in reality, but there are means to achieving this end that do not involve paying them an annual fee to do your job.
Governments the world over have swooped in to seize control of industries they imagine as too critical to be left alone. This is as true for Ghana as it is for the most advanced economies of the world. The recent AI revolution sparked by OpenAI’s GPT models caused a similar crisis in the US, Europe and elsewhere. With power comes regulation, and this is what NITA is trying to achieve here. The tech space in Ghana has proved a little too exciting to be left to its own devices.
On the other hand, calls for regulation sometimes come from within the industries themselves, perhaps to preempt the eventual takeover by the state, but often to gate-keep the benefits of participating in the industry, and to bring some semblance of order and control by incumbents into the field. Organisations like the Ghana Bar Association and the various professional bodies for bankers, accountants, various labour unions etc. fit in here.
Many Ghanian techies may not be aware of this, but we already have one of those: the Institute of ICT Professionals, Ghana (IIPGH).
In March 2023, I joined a Google Meet call put together by persons attempting to found the Chartered Institute of Computing and Information Technology, Ghana (CICIT,GH). Its plan was to regulate tech work through a government-backed monopoly on participating in this industry. The Institute would control who gets to work in tech, and members will pay it an annual fee to remain in good standing. You laugh, but if this became a thing, you could become a Chartered SRE. Only in Ghana.
As we can see, the impulse to organise and regulate isn’t only coming from NITA. It’s also coming from within the industry. Like I already stated, government types abhor governance vacuums, and they don’t only work within government agencies. They are everywhere.
Those who are up in arms against NITA for this specific bill, particularly those who do not want the government to be in the business of certifying their competence need to understand that, either way, should any form of meaningful regulation be enforced in the space, it will come from the government, directly or indirectly. Whether you like it or yes, some agent of the Government of the Republic of Ghana will determine if a developer is legally permitted to write code, or manage deployments for a living.
But as you’ll soon see, this goes way beyond the position that only those with expertise in certain stacks or subfields of the space are qualified to be the government-appointed gatekeepers. There’s a much deeper conflict we need to appreciate.
In a recent X Space hosted by DevCongress in response to the online conversation about the Bill, I heard several attempts to justify why tech work, particularly software engineering, couldn’t be regulated in the way the medical and legal practices are.
I fear that those arguments fail to understand the nature of the beast, and I hope this article helps clarify it. Such arguments hold no water, unfortunately. There is nothing inherent in tech work that makes regulation impractical, nothing special about the pervasiveness of the field in other sectors and industries that allows it to resist the impulse to put the entire practice under NITA’s thumb.
In fact, that same ubiquity and ever growing importance of computing systems are strong arguments in favour of more regulation. You wouldn’t want a self-taught pilot with a couple of years under the belt in charge of your eventual flight out of this country. You probably wouldn’t trust a surgeon who hasn’t been to the university (but who aced his interview and who has done this stuff before) to fix up your loved ones. There’s an element of the fear of the unknown, a situationally-conditioned low appetite for risk and the need to be assured of safety that drives people to want to regulate other people’s work, if it means protecting themselves.
Understanding the Resistance
The community of ICT workers in Ghana who are most vocally against the NITA bill are a peculiar sort. This group is dominated by software engineers and other techies whose attitudes, ideas and politics are downstream of the culture that shaped the Free Software Movement and the global Open Source community.
The Hacker Culture of the 1960s and ‘70s in the US was to a large extent meritocratic and anti-authoritarian. It eschewed credentials and degrees, valued individual skill and creativity, maintained that knowledge should be free, computing power accessible, authority distrusted and power decentralised.
If you’ve grown up in Ghana, you’ll recognise immediately that these values are antithetical to our mainstream culture.
The Hacker ethos also runs counter to the centralising tendencies of American-style business, and it would have been crushed under economic pressures by increasingly powerful corporations and old-school thinking in the US government had folks like Richard Stallman and co not rebelled and forced the issue in the ‘80s. As you can see, this fight goes way beyond Ghana, and its been fought for decades in different arenas, by different generations. No be today matter.
The cultural triumph won by the Free Software Movement and related campaigns has made several things we take for granted possible. Today, a kid with a laptop and an Internet connection can change the world (I paraphrase the founding vision of Jorn Lyseggen’s MEST). Alloysius Attah of Farmerline can positively impact hundreds of thousands of lives with software he initiated, without needing a degree in Computer Science, or the approval of some professional body or government lackey to do so. Much of the world’s digital infrastructure depends on hard working volunteers who contribute for pure love of the game, who do not need anyone’s permission to do so.
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All of this is possible because a few idealists realised what they were losing, and fought hard to maintain the culture that gave them birth. And thanks to them, the world has reaped countless benefits.
For many tech workers in Ghana, this culture of open access, open collaboration and (crucially) the lack of credentialed gatekeeping and regulatory barriers is exactly what has made them who they are today. It is exactly what has made the industry so important to the global economy and wider society today. For these people, it feels like a betrayal (really, an insult) that some government-types will dare seize control over a thing they do not own, over which none of us can lay claim.
That notwithstanding, it’s important for those resisting the NITA Bill today to realise that not everyone who looks like them thinks like they do. The Hacker ethos is a peculiar kind, and there are many people happy to comply with any directive from above if it pays the bills and makes them look good.
Cases in point: the sort of person who strings together a couple of “provided as-is” open-source projects to create something that benefits hundreds of thousands of users is very different from the person who is perfectly fine with asking Oracle’s permission just to use a database. The sort of person who respects “show me the code” is not the kind who will happily pay thousands of cedis to a multibillion-dollar corporation just to take an exam that proves — for only 2 years — that they know their stuff. The former is a Hacker, the latter will happily suit up and wear the Official Badge of Approval™. The former is the exception, the latter is the norm.
Okay, and so?
Well, I don’t know. The odds are against those who’d rather maintain the status-quo, who just want to be left alone so they can build and learn and build some more.
The success of the Free Software Movement have been so thorough that it gives me hope that an open culture around tech can be maintained even in this little country called Ghana, in spite of a surrounding culture that seems designed to smother this kind of creative and occupational freedom. But it is going to be a fight, and we need to be sharp. Like I mentioned at the opening, this move by NITA is a power grab. It is pure political action. No amount of logic can override that reality. So, it can only be fought with political action.
The one solid argument that can be made against NITA’s move to regulate tech work is that you shouldn’t kill your golden goose. What’s worked immensely well for the rest of the world, and for Ghana, should not be tampered with.
This experiment of open access to technology is an accident of history: everywhere else, people and groups close up to protect their interests and try to assert control over such good things. The Hackers and their disciples thought otherwise, and the tech space has since been enriched by millions of contributions from across the globe, including some from Ghana.
Even massive corporations that typically do everything they can to maintain and increase their leverage maintain a strong commitment to keeping the commons. For all Big Tech’s faults, they are smart enough to water the soil in which they grow. An agency of the Government of Ghana would be wise to not ignore the wisdom of the prevailing culture.
Besides this argument, the resolution of this situation comes down to who has the power to wrest control over Ghana’s growing tech space: the state, local big tech or the average worker?
I guess we’ll see.
A Modest Proposal
Since we’re all about solutions, I will conclude with a vision for what the industry’s dance with NITA can look like.
NITA is much more than those guys trying to tell us what and how to do what we do best. Perhaps they should focus on all the other stuff they do and give this a rest. But we know they won’t because government’s got to govern, right? There is, I believe a reasonable way forward that both preserves the culture that has made the industry what it is today, and gives the government types some pre-eminence in guiding the industry.
NITA, for all its recent missteps in proposing legislation, can still act as a leading light in Ghana’s tech space, should it have the leadership with the right principles and vision.
The first thing NITA (and other government agencies in Ghana) needs to understand is that its mandate is of service, not of lordship. This cuts to the heart of the rot in Ghana’s political culture, and I have no confidence that it can be fixed in the short term. But a single government agency under good leadership can lead the way.
A National IT Agency that realises that it exists to serve the needs of the tech community, grow its capacity to help it compete within the subregion (where Nigeria is mogging us as we speak) and the continent must first learn to speak the community’s language, walk in its shoes and understand its dos and don’ts, to help it better align with the wider national strategy.
A National IT Agency, rightly oriented, will understand that the tech community values merit over titles and delegated authority. Knowing this, it will seek to transform itself into an elite organisation within the space, constantly hiring the best talent and putting them to use to build the best public IT infrastructure, to make Ghana a leading example of how to make the most of its IT talent.
A rightly oriented National IT Agency should realise that a country’s tech sector can have outsized global impact if the geniuses in the building aren’t driven out by daft legislation, uninspiring practice, loose standards and the fostering of a culture that is the direct opposite of what it needs to compete with the best. Tiny countries leave a large footprint and earn themselves a seat at the table when they get industry right. And tech scales like no other.
NITA definitely has some sort of regulatory footprint it must maintain. I won’t get into that. But when it comes to how it relates to the tech labour force and the open community of builders and shapers in our local industry, a sensible strategic choice is to model the good it seeks, not to impose it, and to leave us to build.
My modest proposal is that NITA needs to fix itself.