Following Nigeria's recent ban on depicting ritual killings and smoking in movies, Ghanaian director Ola Michael has urged the activation of existing classification laws in Ghana to regulate sensitive content in media.

Speaking to GhanaWeb's Isaac Dadzie, Michael emphasized that Ghana has regulations to restrict content showcasing smoking, money rituals, and other vices, but their enforcement has been lacking."I have followed the Nigerian narrative for a long time. It has existed for a long time. In any movie you see, there has to be some money ritual, some ritual killing, campus ritual killing, and all that. Leaders at that time realised this was going to be a huge problem if they didn't stop it. So they began looking for some sort of regulation towards it.

"Now, if you come to Ghana, let's look at the larger board. Is this something we want the young people to keep learning? No. Is it the only thing we can do in movies? No," he said.

He criticized the political inertia preventing these laws from being operational, leading to the glamourization of such vices influenced by Nigerian films."The version of the NFVCB in Ghana is the film classification board. I was an integral part of the people that drafted the law, and I know exactly why we put every single line there. If we had activated this, we wouldn't have faced these challenges because ours covers TV stations as well.

"So such a law exists, but it hasn't been activated. The law that we drafted and was passed by parliament is sleeping and that is because the people that have been positioned to activate it are also sleeping. It's been a political football. So that is the challenge,” he said.

Michael highlighted the importance of active classification to protect young viewers and drew parallels with India's stringent film guidelines as a model.

He called for immediate enforcement to prevent further negative impacts on Ghanaian society."If you watch Bollywood movies, before the movie starts, there's a classification and censorship certificate shown. After that, there's a compulsory advert advising people against smoking for every movie… because the tobacco industry is a strong one. You cannot stop them so all you do is create guidelines that will prevent the young ones from smoking. So, in their films, you will never see a young person smoking. It's either a certain policeman or a rich man smoking.

“In Nigeria, they have the right to even take out any iota of smoke. In the films, they have the right to do that. And you can't do anything about it. The only way you can deal with them is to go to the courts to challenge the law.

"There are people responsible for that, but they are just playing politics with it. Christopher was part of us when we were drafting the law, and he is supposed to be the chairman of the classification committee but the film authority executive secretary feels she is so powerful that she has to set up her own classification committee.

“And it's become a political football for the past four or five years. That is why you see all these things happening, and it seems like there's no law," he said.