Ghana Galamsey Satire: 4 Signs We’re Dining at Our Funeral

This Ghana galamsey satire begins where common sense ends. Once upon a time in the Republic of Uncommon Sense, our rivers were storytellers and our farms were breadwinners. Today, some rivers pour like breakfast beverages—thick, bitter, and foaming with silt. Fishermen dip calabashes as if at a cocoa stand, while children ask whether the Ankobra Special comes with sugar. Even the catfish swim about in confusion, wondering who turned their home into Milo without milk.

Ghana Galamsey Satire: Rivers That Taste Like Cocoa Drink

On the farms, the tale is no less absurd. Cassava sprouts with a side of mercury; kontomire leaves arrive seasoned with arsenic; tomatoes carry a faint crunch of cadmium. The nation’s own regulator has sung the dirge: produce from mining zones is laced with heavy metals, fish in major rivers are often unsafe, and soils once rich with cocoa promise are poisoned beyond redemption. For sober background and public notices, see EPA Ghana. We are no longer eating food; we are nibbling our way through slow-motion suicide.

And yet the speeches continue. Big words swagger through press conferences—“roadmaps,” “frameworks,” “renewed onslaughts”—while the rivers, unimpressed, keep flowing the colour of rust. In the Republic, grammar is robust; the water is not.

Nine Months of Excuses

When Oliver Barker-Vormawor and citizens staged the #StopGalamseyNow vigil, he did not recite lab values; he chose midwifery. “Nine months is enough to give birth!” he cried. Goats manage it on schedule, but our national midwives still sit at the labour ward debating whether the contractions are genuine or mere indigestion after too much fufu. While citizens marched with placards, rivers groaned in silence and the midwives leafed through another dictionary for a fresher synonym of “urgent.”

Reclaimed lands are snatched back by excavators like shirts from a drying line. Each new announcement sounds less like victory and more like rehearsal for the next invasion. If you reclaimed it yesterday and lost it today, you did not reclaim land; you rehearsed it.

Last-Resort Leadership and the Politics of Blame

The call for a state of emergency tolls like a church bell; the reply remains, “a last resort.” A last resort to what—too much clean water? Too many healthy farms? Meanwhile, the budget finds fuel for excavators but struggles to find boots for riverbanks. Perhaps we should declare a state of emergency for our vocabulary: “robust” is exhausted; “framework” needs leave.

Both major parties take turns blaming the other. One swears the other is godfather of the pits; the other retorts that promises were emptier than a broken calabash. In the middle, the rivers laugh bitterly: it matters little which colour your T-shirt is when you’re drinking poison from the same pot. Even the Concerned Drivers Association has noticed—politicians treat galamsey like trotro fares; the tune changes with the driver.

Prescriptions from the Republic

Satire must sting, but it must also point home. The Republic therefore prescribes the following—not in PowerPoint, but in practice:

• Declare a real state of emergency. Boots to rivers, not just suits to conferences. The goal is clear water, not clear talking points.
• Measure success in water, not pressers. Until the Ankobra runs blue again, spare us the victory laps. Publish independent monthly turbidity and heavy-metal readings for public view.
• Put promises on probation. If cocoa still tastes like mercury after your tenure, let your pension be paid in poisoned tilapia—symbolically, of course, but loudly.
• Reclaim and guard. Patrol recovered lands with the zeal used at election collation centres. No more “reclaim today, re-pit tomorrow.”
• Create better livelihoods. Equip the youth for work that beats illegal mining—community water restoration, agro-processing, digital jobs, forestry brigades. No one should choose between dying of poverty and dying of mercury.

Curtain Call

The verdict from the rivers is already in. Forests stand stripped, farms yield poison, and people trade health for gold dust. We are dining at our own funeral banquet, with a menu written in mercury and arsenic. As the elders say, “The one who refuses advice will bathe in poisoned water.”

🔗 Read next (internal): IMF Ghana Satire: 7 Hard Truths Exposed
🔗 Background (external): EPA Ghana

Curtain note: If this stirred you, share it; if it angered you, organize; and if it made you laugh, keep laughing—then demand better. Clean rivers are not a luxury; they are a birthright in the Republic of Uncommon Sense.