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Introduction
Less than 24 hours after John Dramani Mahama was sworn in as Ghana’s 6th President in a packed ceremony held at Black Stars Square (formerly Independence Square) on Jan. 7, 2025, the country’s presidency website was replaced with Mr Mahama’s campaign website.
When DUBAWA entered Ghana’s presidency domain name, www.presidency.gov.gh, in a browser, it soon redirected to www.johnmahama.org, which displayed the new president’s campaign activities in the heat of the 2024 general election.
Using OSINT tools to trace the replacement
In tracing the redirection of Ghana’s presidency website, DUBAWA used three open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools to gather and analyse the data collected. These tools are Wheregoes, Redirect Checker, and Whatsmydns.
The European Union (EU) defines open-source intelligence as “the practice of collecting and analysing information from open sources to produce actionable intelligence.”
DUBAWA’s check on Whatsmydns found that the country’s presidency website had been redirected to Mr Mahama’s campaign website.
See the result of the Whatsmydns check below.
This finding was confirmed by Wheregoes and Redirect Checker, which showed a complete and permanent replacement of the initial domain.
Also, see the result of the Wheregoes check below.
Temporary versus permanent redirections
When performing maintenance, redirecting is standard practice for changing a page’s domain name and uniform resource locators (URLs). A URL is a unique resource address on the Internet that helps to retrieve published resources.
“If you don’t set redirects up, links to your site become a dead end,” IT consultant George Zlatin said.
Experts have distinguished between temporary and permanent redirections. To identify if the domain name redirection is temporary, one would see these codes: 302 (found), 303 (see other), or 307 (temporary redirect).
However, codes 301 (moved permanently) and 308 (permanent redirect) identify a permanent redirection.
Zlatan noted that “302 redirects are not as common as 301 redirects and are considered a “temporary relocation.” Implementing them happens during site maintenance, but since most sites have a maintenance mode where developers and admins can test changes before they go live.”
The search results on Ghana’s presidency domain name displayed the code 301, representing permanent redirection.
Data on visits to the Presidency website
Similarweb, a traffic and website performance tool, has revealed that Ghana’s presidency website had over 1,945 visits in Dec. 2024, with 1.45 page views per visit.
The website’s average visit duration, ranked 82,262 globally, was 00:00:46, and its bounce rate was 62.22%.
The tool further disclosed that visits to the presidency website were over 3,123 in October 2024 and declined to 2,123 in November 2024.
Considering the website’s monthly visits, the new administration is expected to inform the public about whatever may be behind the redirection.
However, there has not been any communication from the presidency on the redirection.
Reaction of some Ghanaians to the development
Some Ghanaians have called out President Mahama for permitting the redirection of the country’s presidency website.
See the reactions here, here, here, here, and here.
Reacting to the issue on Jan. 10, 2025, an X user, @bakervogues, wrote:
“This is pretty unfortunate and flies against everything that is administratively proper. In fact, this offends our national security strategy, if not several laws.”
The lawyer argued that the presidency website, as well as official social media handles for part of “what is referred to as Critical National Information Infrastructure.” In view of this, it was unacceptable for the current regime to “decamp the party [website] onto critical national information systems.”
“You cannot under any circumstance decamp the party onto critical national information systems. No! No! No! I am inclined to think whoever is behind this is unaware of the security impropriety of this act. But still, it couldn’t have been done without someone having access to the backend of the Government domain and even a sign-off by someone who should have known better,” the X user wrote.
Another X user, @KwabenaAgyema, wrote on Jan. 11, 2025:
“Mahama has redirected the official presidency website presidency.gov.gh to his personal site & Ghanaians are silent. If Akufo-Addo had done this, the ‘neutrals’ would be screaming, corruption, abuse of power, but because it’s their favourite, it’s suddenly acceptable. Hypocrites!”
However, another X user, @Ever_YPT, believes the redirection may have been motivated by ongoing maintenance of the presidency website.
“The Presidency.gov.gh is presently undergoing maintenance. Maybe because we have trust & transparency issues, they should have made an announcement to this effect if they’re done with Maintenance. The redirection usually takes up to 48 hours to propagate, then it goes back to normal,” he said.
Impact of the redirection on the work of fact-checkers and journalists
The redirection of the Presidency has profound implications for the work of fact-checkers and journalists.
First, readers would not have access to data on the Presidency website that may have been hyperlinked in published stories.
Second, data on previous governments’ activities published on the Presidency website would not be available for reference by fact-checkers and journalists.
Third, fact-checkers and journalists who rely on data on the Presidency website for ongoing investigative work would not have any material to use, especially if the data were not archived.
Fourth, the Presidency website, which houses the institutional memory of previous administrations, may be permanently lost if the current regime does not preserve the data.
Conclusion
Fifth, the incident may serve as a wake-up call for fact-checkers and journalists to master using archival tools to archive published articles for their work.
The Mahama government is barely six days old. However, the Presidency website, a go-to point for information about ongoing government projects and activities, may be lost if not restored immediately.
