“Politicians have very cold hearts, just like witches have very cold tits” ― the first wise man in BC 00
A Ghana Politics Satire
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephyra, which was later renamed Corinth. He was a king with considerable wit, but was equally known for his tyrannical rule.
However, this king later faced an unimaginable fate — one he had to live with, just as he had to live with his tongue his whole life.
For his offences against Zeus, the god of thunder and justice, and Hades, the Greek god of the dead, Sisyphus was punished eternally. It takes massive and expert carelessness to offend gods of such immeasurable standing.
“For what you’ve done against the gods, we condemn you to roll the heaviest boulder up the hill for the rest of your life,” Hades might have told him as his final judgment, with Zeus nodding in agreement.
The Punishment
And so Sisyphus rolled the boulder repeatedly up the hill. But just when he felt he was almost at the summit, the boulder would roll back down to the foot, just for him to start all over again. This happened every single time. In Ghanaian parlance, we wittily describe such a situation as — “w’ani bɛ hu Canaan nanso wo nan ensi hɔ da.” That is a punishment that even the strongest and most durable persons could barely endure.
Now, reading up to this point makes you ask what this myth has to do with you as a Ghanaian. This is where I introduce the part that may not even surprise you, because we as Ghanaians have seen it all.
Just like the punishment Sisyphus endured eternally, Ghanaians are experiencing its equivalent. Our boulders, however, are not actual objects. They are humans just like us, called Politicians, and they make life honorably difficult for their fellow citizens.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the bald politician, the pot-bellied politician, the short politician, the fat or the slim politician. These are the nightmares we can’t ever run away from.
And our crime as Ghanaians appears to be the simple fact that we were born Ghanaians. And our punishment? Our beloved politicians who pretend to solve problems but rather create more.
Welcome to Ghana politics satire where the myth is not mythology at all.
The Election Cycle
They say the proof is in the pudding, but our proof as Ghanaians arrives every four years, and on schedule — a punctuality our infrastructure has never managed to achieve.
Ghanaians wake before the sun has committed to the day of election. We join queues stretching far enough to make a person question every decision that led us to that polling station, and stand in the heat, because the weather has apparently decided that democratic participation should include physical discomfort as standard. Eventually, ballots are collected, marks are made, and everybody goes home.
Then, just like Sisyphus watching the boulder roll back down after all that effort, the results arrive and the cedi falls anyway. Fuel prices adjust upward. The winners move into air-conditioned offices while the voters return to the same lives they had before the election.
And just like that, the boulder is back at the foot of the hill, but we knew that would happen anyway.
The Promises
Every Ghanaian boulder, it turns out, comes with a manifesto.
Before the cycle of pushing begins again, there is a rally, a microphone, and a suit that costs more than the average constituent earns in three months. Most importantly, there are promises — specific, beautifully packaged promises delivered with the confidence of an adult film star.
One district, one factory and jobs for the youth. Free air, reduced prices of a pair of scissors. In addition, we will build a digitised economy and transform Ghana into a science fiction. Four years pass and the factories are under construction. The free thing has become a subsidised thing. Moreover, the subsidised thing has been quietly discontinued pending review. The rally is rescheduled for next month, with the same architectural promises — specific enough to sound credible, vague enough to be unfalsifiable.
Sisyphus had a boulder, and Ghanaians have manifestos, but the weight is approximately the same.
The Cost Of Living
Here is something the myth does not tell you — the boulder gets heavier.
Not because the boulder itself changes. Rather, it is because the person pushing it gets weaker. Fuel prices rise and the trotro fare adjusts accordingly. The market woman adjusts her prices accordingly. The salary, however, does not adjust because the salary has never once adjusted to anything except the comfort of the people setting it.
A Ghanaian family sits at the evening table with a pen and paper. The numbers refuse to add up. The fuel, the food, the school fees, the rent. Additionally, there is the light bill, which in Ghana arrives not as a bill but as a threat, because ECG has a relationship with consistency best described as complicated.
The boulder does not care about any of this mathematics. It simply gets heavier. And the politicians who designed it are at a longer table, with gold forks, and menus printed on paper heavier than the average Ghanaian’s monthly pay slip.
The Infrastructure
There is a road somewhere in Ghana that has been under construction longer than some of the people driving on it have been alive.
Every Ghanaian knows at least one road like that. The signage promising completion by a date that has already passed twice stands at the entrance with the same words a Ghanaian politician loves to utter. And somewhere between receiving payment and completing the road, however, the contractor developed other priorities.
Beyond the roads, consider the hospital announced in the manifesto and the school that exists in the budget but not in the constituency. Then there is the water system commissioned with a ribbon and a dignitary, which has not produced water since the week of the inauguration because the supporting infrastructure budget was absorbed somewhere between allocation and implementation. The hill, it turns out, is the poor infrastructural legacies of successive governments since independence.
The Corruption
Here is where the Ghanaian version departs most dramatically from the original myth.
Sisyphus pushed the boulder alone — no procurement process, no committee, no sole-sourcing arrangement with a contractor related to someone on the committee. In Ghana, however, the boulder has a budget.
The budget is allocated, and committee is formed. The committee approves a contractor, who subcontracts to another contractor whose brother-in-law registered a company last Tuesday. Further, the brother-in-law receives sixty percent upfront, and the project moves four metres. After the remaining forty percent is released, it moves two more. A report confirms successful movement of the project so far, and a supplementary budget is requested for the remaining distance.
The boulder drops back down at the foot of the hill, for Ghanaians to roll back up.
An alarm then blows over alleged irregularities. A commission investigates. The report is received, discussed for one week, and placed somewhere near the previous report. Unsurprisingly, the contractor receives a new contract.
Ghanaians simply watch as our monies “get eaten”, and are then asked to vote for the people “who ate it”— the people who will later become boulders for us to push.
NDC VS NPP — Different Boulders, Different Parties
This is the detail that separates Ghana politics satire from actual Greek tragedy — at least Sisyphus pushed the same boulder. He knew its weight, its texture, the exact angle at which it became impossible to hold.
Ghanaians do not even have that luxury and consistency.
Every four or eight years, the boulder changes. A new set of people arrives with new energy and new suits, absolutely convinced that the previous government governed incorrectly. They explain that this mess was different, more externally influenced, more inherited than created before requesting one more electoral cycle.
Then the other side returns. Same conviction, same hill, same boulder and same outcome.
NDC. NPP. NPP. NDC. The boulder does not really change. It simply rolls back down with a reliability akin to the failed systems they created.
The Galamsey Experience
The nation Ghana is experiencing an existential crisis called Galamsey otherwise known as illegal mining. A group of rebellious citizens and even foreign nationals have vowed to the ancestors to destroy the lands and water bodies that sustain us. It’s another huge boulder Ghanaians have had to roll up the hills too for many a year now. However, let’s guess the real enablers and financiers behind the devastation. Your guess is as clean as mine. The bigger boulders, the Politicians.
DCEs were captured in exposés opening the floodgates for the rebels to destroy the lands and water bodies but still at post like nothing happened. Furthermore, other politically connected individuals have been fingered in the past and present but the cosmetics are concealing justice for the motherland.
They are dancing around the issues that threaten our very existence for cheap political scores that would not even qualify as a pass mark anywhere else in the world.
Ghanaians Are Naturally Happy People
This Ghana politics satire is not complete without acknowledging the philosopher Albert Camus, who thought about Sisyphus long enough to write an entire essay. His conclusion was not what you might expect.
Camus did not conclude that Sisyphus was broken. Instead, he argued that at some point Sisyphus made a decision — not to stop pushing, but about how to push. On the walk back down to collect the boulder, in that moment between the rolling and the beginning again, Sisyphus was free. The punishment controlled the pushing but could not control what happened inside him on the way down to the foot of the hill.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
When I look at Ghanaians — not the politicians who are expert renegers, not the manifesto writers but actual Ghanaians. The market woman who has recalculated her prices so many times, the graduate who has walked the certificates from office to office long enough to know which office to skip. The voter who woke before sunrise and queued in the sun for the eighth time in thirty years.
I do not see people defeated by the boulders. Instead, I see people who have decided — quietly, firmly, in the specific Ghanaian way things are decided, that the boulder is not the point. The pushing is the point.
Not because the summit is guaranteed. Not because the next set of hands will push differently. But because Ghanaians have discovered what Camus discovered from the outside — that the person pushing can be freer than the person who designed the punishment.
The boulder will obviously always roll back down, and Ghanaians will walk back to collect it. Why? Because, we will never stop voting. Whenever we vote, we select a different boulder to push up the hill again.
And on that walk back down to pick the boulder, we laugh at the trotro stop and at the waakye joint by the gutter. We also laugh in the argument about football, and about these same politicians. We create something that looks, from a distance, remarkably like happiness. Because Ghanaians are naturally happy people.
We love to laugh, sing, and dance even in the midst of the most perilous situations. That’s why we still love our politicians. Not because they don’t disappoint us all the time, but because we have learned to live with them, and create our happiness from within us.
So when someone says he imagines Ghanaians are happy people, tell him we indeed are.
Not because the boulder stopped rolling and our problems evaporated, but because Ghanaians never stopped walking back down to collect it, just like Sisyphus never stopped.
After all, it’s the meaning to life that matters.
The Brewed Satire
Disclaimer: Exaggerated for a satiric effect
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