Once upon a time in the Republic of Uncommon Sense, rivers no longer quenched thirst—they served chocolate drink. Not the sweet Nestlé Milo type, but the Ankobra Special: thick, bitter, and foaming with silt. Fishermen dipped their calabashes into it like mugs at a street-side cocoa beverage seller, while children asked if it came with sugar. Even the catfish swam about in confusion, wondering who had turned their home into a breakfast beverage gone wrong.
On the farms, the story is no less absurd. Cassava now sprouts with a side of mercury, kontomire leaves come seasoned with arsenic, and tomatoes carry the faint crunch of cadmium. The EPA, usually as quiet as a church mouse in harmattan, has broken into a funeral hymn: Ghana’s farm produce in mining zones is laced with heavy metals, fish in major rivers are unsafe for human consumption, and soils once rich with cocoa promise are poisoned beyond redemption. We are no longer eating food; we are nibbling away at slow-motion suicide.
Yet when Oliver Barker-Vormawor led the #StopGalamseyNow vigil in Accra, his cry was not about technical reports or laboratory data. He shouted, “Nine months is enough to give birth!” Nine months, indeed. Goats manage it on schedule, but our government midwives still sit in the labour ward arguing whether the contractions are genuine or just indigestion after too much fufu.
Citizens marched with placards, rivers groaned in silence, and the midwives leafed through their grammar books for another round of “robust frameworks” and “renewed onslaughts.”
The demand for a state of emergency keeps echoing like a church bell, but government insists it is “a last resort.” Last resort to what? Too much clean water? Too many healthy farms? Perhaps they fear the excess of responsibility.
Meanwhile, reclaimed lands are seized back by miners like shirts snatched from the drying line, and every announcement of reclamation sounds less like victory and more like rehearsal for the next invasion.
Both parties take turns blaming each other. NDC insists NPP is the godfather of the pits; NPP insists NDC’s promises were emptier than a broken calabash. And 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 calls out the hypocrisy, warning that politicians treat galamsey like trotro fares—changing their tune depending on who is at the wheel.
And through it all, the EPA’s data hangs like a dark cloud: poisoned fish, toxic cocoa, contaminated vegetables. The very things that sustain us have turned executioners. We are dining at our own funeral banquet, with a menu written in mercury and arsenic.
The rivers have given their verdict. They no longer flow as gifts of life but as grim reminders of neglect. The forests stand stripped, the farms yield poison, and the people trade health for gold dust. In the Republic of Uncommon Sense, we have perfected the art of eating death with a smile.
As the elders say, “He who sells the forest will soon drink poison in the shade.”
But in the Republic of Uncommon Sense, satire is not only for laughter; it must also proffer solutions. So here are the Republic’s prescriptions for the galamsey plague:
- Declare a State of Emergency, but make it real. Not the PowerPoint type. Deploy boots to rivers, not just suits to conferences.
- Measure success in rivers turned clear, not press statements. Until the Ankobra runs blue again, don’t tell us about “robust frameworks.”
- Put every political promise on probation. If cocoa still tastes like mercury after your tenure, your pension should be paid in poisoned tilapia.
- Reclaim and guard, not reclaim and forget. Lands taken back must be monitored with the same zeal used in monitoring election collation centers.
- Offer livelihoods that beat galamsey. Give the youth decent work, so they don’t have to choose between dying of poverty and dying of mercury.
So yes, the Republic has solutions. Whether they are taken up or tossed into the nearest polluted river is another story.
As the elders say: “The one who refuses advice will bathe in poisoned water.”
Gong. Curtain.
Jimmy Aglah
Republicofuncommonsense.com
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