Madam Victoria Lakshmi Hamah, a former Deputy Minister for Communications, has transformed public scrutiny into academic excellence, earning a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Public Administration and Policy Management from the University of Ghana (UG) Business School, Legon.
Dr Hamah’s degree was conferred on Tuesday, February 10, 2026, at the Great Hall, celebrating a moment of academic excellence, resilience, and impactful scholarship. The achievement follows years of dedicated research examining women’s representation and influence in Ghana’s parliamentary system.
Her dissertation, titled “Gender Asymmetry in Ghana’s Parliamentary Committees: A Critical Analysis of Women’s Representation and Legislative Influence,” offers a rigorous examination of the institutional and cultural dynamics that shape women’s participation in legislative leadership.
Gendered scrutiny
In a reflective PhD personal statement titled “Humble Recollections: From Storming Seas to the Calm Shore: My Doctoral Journey Through Power and Gender”, released on Tuesday, February 10, Dr. Hamah described earning her PhD as a significant milestone in a journey shaped by her experiences with power, gender, and political scrutiny in Ghana’s public life.
She said the story of her public life over the past decade has, unfortunately, been reduced to scandal. She noted that such a framing may be convenient for public consumption, but it is not faithful to the fuller truth of her journey.
According to Dr. Hamah, that narrow narrative has obscured a more instructive reality — that her trajectory in public life was shaped not by dismissal or personal failure, but by the response of power when a woman refuses to make herself smaller.
She explained that her years as a student leader, a gender activist, and later as a Deputy Minister were marked by sustained challenges to her legitimacy. Those challenges, she said, had little to do with competence or mandate, and far more to do with entrenched gendered norms that continue to define who is allowed authority, visibility, and control.
Dr Hamah also reflected on how, over the years, her physical appearance became a subject of public scrutiny, while her confidence was often recoded as excess. She added that her political presence was constrained by a culture that remains uneasy with women who occupy power without deference.
Institutional hypocrisy
Speaking on the controversy that surrounded her time in office, she said the institutional response was swift, moralistic, and largely indifferent to context. She argued that the language of accountability was deployed to justify strict censure and sanction, even as deeper structural hypocrisy remained largely uninterrogated.
In that moment, Dr. Hamah said, the political system revealed something deeper — a preference for spectacle over justice, and a willingness to sacrifice women in order to preserve institutional comfort rather than confront its own contradictions.
She further stated that her departure from office did not represent retreat, but rather a critical reckoning. She rejected the assumption that removal from executive power amounts to political erasure.
Instead, Dr. Hamah said she turned to systematic inquiry as a continuation of her political engagement through scholarly means. That intellectual turn, she explained, led her into doctoral study, not as an escape from politics, but as a deliberate effort to interrogate the institutional, cultural, and power-laden conditions that shape leadership, morality, and exclusion in public life.
Dissertation focus
Her dissertation examines how “institutional design, political culture, and asymmetrical power relations condition women’s participation and constrain their legislative influence.”
Dr. Hamah emphasised that her work was grounded in empirical analysis rather than personal narrative, noting: “This work is not autobiographical reflection disguised as scholarship; it is a rigorously grounded political intervention,” she stressed.
Beyond academia, she highlighted her long-standing advocacy for women’s political empowerment through the Progressive Organisation for Women’s Advancement (POWA), which she founded to protect women operating within “structurally hostile environments.”
“Women’s political participation must be actively protected,” she emphasised, explaining that her experiences in government only “sharpened my understanding of its necessity.”
Dr. Hamah noted her focus was not on personal redemption but systemic change. “My intellectual and professional trajectory is not oriented toward rehabilitation or redemption, but toward transformation,” she wrote in her personal statement.
Positioning herself as both scholar and practitioner, she argued that she now understands power “both from within institutional authority and from its margins.”
Dr. Hamah reflected on political vulnerability as a form of exposure and strength: “I have learned that in politics, falling is not synonymous with failure; often, it signals that one has exposed what the system would rather leave unseen. That exposure, in itself, is a form of power”.
She further added that she hopes her experience in public life will inspire young women to challenge the long-held myth that women cannot succeed in politics or any field of endeavour. She noted that such beliefs endure not because they are true, but because societies have not done enough to dismantle the structural barriers and inhibitions that continue to limit women’s full potential.
