By Gifty Boateng
Victoria Bright has spent decades building a reputation. As a legal advisor to former President John Kufuor and a deputy minister in his administration, she understood the weight of public perception. But nothing prepared her for the morning she saw herself transformed, without her knowledge or consent, into a cog in someone else’s political machine.
The image appeared in a Facebook video posted by an account called “Dr Bawumia Campaign.” There she was, spliced into a montage of supporters of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) flagbearer, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia. The implication was clear: Victoria Bright was on the team.
There was just one problem. She isn’t.
“I cringed,” Bright recalled on the AM Show on JoyNews, her voice still carrying the disbelief of someone who had been written into a story not her own. “I said, no, I mean, this is wrong, because I’m not part of Dr. Bawumia’s campaign team.”
What followed was a public plea, not for political advantage, but for something more fundamental: the right to define her own identity in an age where social media algorithms care little for the truth.
The genesis of the video was, by Bright’s account, entirely innocent. She had gone to pay a private visit to her former boss, President Kufuor, at his residence. It was a personal call, unconnected to any political agenda. What she did not know was that Dr. Bawumia had chosen the same day and time to pay a courtesy call on the elder statesman.
The two visits coincided, but they did not merge. Bright waited separately while the flagbearer met with Kufuor. When the meeting concluded, Dr. Bawumia, on his way out, saw her and extended a polite greeting. She returned it. The exchange lasted seconds.
“That was it,” she said. “How someone can just take that clip and totally misrepresent, I’m not even part of NPP anymore.”
But in the video, those seconds were extracted from their context and presented as evidence of allegiance. Bright found herself grouped with Dr. Kobina Arthur Kennedy, a known NPP stalwart who had, unlike her, sat in on the meeting. The implication was that both were integral to Bawumia’s campaign machinery.
For Bright, the misrepresentation was not just an annoyance; it was an erasure of her chosen political distance. For reasons she has not fully detailed, she no longer identifies as a member of the NPP. The video, she feared, would chain her to a party she has left and a candidate she is not actively supporting.
When confronted on live television, Kofi Tonto, an aide to Dr. Bawumia, adopted a posture of cooperation. He assured Bright that the campaign had not authorized the video. He suggested it might have been the work of an overzealous supporter, a collage created by someone acting independently.
“I can assure you that we, as a Bawumia Campaign or Dr. Bawumia, will not drag you into anything,” Tonto said. “He has no interest in doing that. He only showed courtesy by extending warm greetings to you, and that’s all he did.”
Tonto promised to investigate and, if necessary, contact the page administrator to have Bright’s image removed. It was a conciliatory response, but it also highlighted a troubling dynamic in modern politics: the decentralization of campaign messaging. When supporters can create and disseminate content without official sanction, who bears responsibility for the distortions?
Bright was not interested in assigning blame. She wanted a correction. “These things can go viral and can totally, totally misrepresent a situation,” she said. “So maybe you can get them to take me off.”
Beneath the surface of this dispute lies a more profound anxiety about the nature of political identity in the digital age. Bright has carefully cultivated her public persona as a former Kufuor legal advisor and an independent entrepreneur. She appears on television to discuss national issues, not to carry water for any party. The video threatened to collapse that distinction.
“I understand that people want to use politics to misbehave,” she said, “but not all of us want to be dragged into it.”
Her insistence on being removed from the video is a assertion of agency, a declaration that public figures retain the right to define their own affiliations. It is also a warning to political operatives that the old rules of engagement where a nod or a handshake could be spun into an endorsement are increasingly untenable in a hyper-connected world.
As of this writing, it remains unclear whether the video has been amended or removed. Tonto requested the link to investigate, but the outcome of that inquiry is unknown. What is clear is that Bright’s experience is not an isolated incident. Across Africa and the world, individuals are finding themselves conscripted into political narratives they never signed up for, their images and identities weaponized by algorithms and activists alike.
For Bright, the stakes are personal. She has no quarrel with Dr. Bawumia, whom she has known for years and describes as a friend. But friendship is not the same as political allegiance. In demanding her image be pulled from the campaign video, she is drawing a line that should need no drawing: that a person’s political identity belongs to them alone.
The video may have been created with a click. But as Bright’s case demonstrates, unwinding a misrepresentation is far more difficult. In the contest between truth and virality, truth often loses. Victoria Bright is fighting to change that equation, one removed image at a time.