Ken Ashigbey stands at the front line of Ghana’s truth-tellers—alongside Manasseh Azure Awuni and Erastus Asare Donkor—calling time on our Republic of Noise where serial callers drown out common sense and galamsey muddies both rivers and reason.
Once upon a time in the Republic of Uncommon Sense, truth became a scarce mineral—rarer than gold, and far less profitable. Those who mined it did not drive V8s; they drove suspicion, insults, and threats of mysterious accidents on the Kumasi highway. The further a society drifts from truth, the more it despises those who dare to speak it. And Ghana, bless her beautiful hypocrisy, has been sprinting from truth like a thief chased by his own conscience.
When falsehood becomes comfortable and illusion becomes culture, truth-tellers are treated like mosquitoes—nobody likes their buzz, but heaven help us if they stop reminding us that rot breeds in silence. We clap for prophets who shout “Fire!” in church, but we hiss at journalists who shout “Corruption!” on TV.
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Ask Manasseh Azure Awuni, the nation’s professional troublemaker who mistakes exposés for hobbies. He dug into shady contracts like a spiritual excavator; instead of thanking him for cleaning the drain, the powerful accused him of bathing in it. When he published “The Contract for Sale,” he didn’t just hit a nerve—he hit the national power grid.
And then there’s Erastus Asare Donkor—the man who looked into the galamsey pits and saw Ghana’s reflection covered in mud. He filmed the devastation, and the boys at the pits—loyal servants of greed—almost turned him into a breaking-news headline. It’s as though we prefer to drink mercury smoothies and call them “mineral water.”
But if truth had a bodyguard, it would be Ken Ashigbey: the unapologetic anti-galamsey crusader whose voice has been louder than an election-week serial caller. He has marched, written, preached, and probably dreamed about saving our rivers. He speaks truth like a man allergic to nonsense—dangerous in a climate where nonsense is pollen season.
Meanwhile, the airwaves are hijacked by a species known to zoologists as Homo Serialcallerius Politicus. Nocturnal, subsisting on mobile credit and slogans, they are identified by the mating call: “Good morning, my brother, let me land!” They roam from station to station, spreading verbal fertilizer on the fields of ignorance. Whether NDC or NPP, they share one ancestor: Allowance.
They turned democracy into karaoke. One sings “We are fixing it,” another replies “We are breaking it,” and the rest of us sit in traffic wondering who exactly “we” are. They defend every scandal with the confidence of a lawyer who hasn’t read the law—and the stamina of a mosquito in rainy season. When truth tries to speak, the backup singers arrive; by the time they finish, facts are dead, decency is buried, and the host is begging for a commercial break.
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Prescription from the Republic of Uncommon Sense: Take one tablet of Common Sense with a full glass of Truth, three times daily. Side effects include self-awareness, accountability, and sudden urges to keep quiet when you have nothing useful to say. Avoid overdosing on hypocrisy—it causes acute national decay. Before you call that radio station to defend the indefensible, ask yourself: when the river dries up, will your party card fetch you water?
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