23/10/2025
Speech Title: The Social Grotesquery of Ghana — Our Laughter in the Face of Looting
By Frederick Nana Kwayisi Asare
Fellow Ghanaians…
Permit me to speak not as a partisan, but as a patriot,
not in anger, but in agony.
For our nation has become a stage of irony…
a theatre where comedy dances upon corruption,
where those with bellies full of stolen monies laugh the loudest,
and the hungry clap, hoping to catch the crumbs of their laughter.
We are living in what I call a social grotesquery, a moral inversion where right and wrong have exchanged robes,
and the nation applauds its own decline in the name of democracy.
Under the leadership of the New Patriotic Party government
headed by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Ghana has not been led into a promised land; we have been led into a labyrinth of lavish corruption.
The watchdogs have become lapdogs.
Institutions meant to protect us are now profit centers for the privileged.
Contracts are inflated like egos, loans are swallowed without a trace, and accountability, that sacred word, is now a ghost haunting the corridors of power.
We were told to believe in The Battle Is the Lord’s; but today, it seems the spoils of that battle have been shared among men.
But I say this with sorrow, not spite, for the greater tragedy is not the greed of the rulers, but the silence of the ruled.
We, the citizens, scroll past scandals. We laugh at theft, we sing along with deceit, and we baptize corruption with tribal loyalty.
We have become comfortable in our discomfort, amused by our abuse, and entertained by our own enslavement.
This, my friends, is the full face of social grotesquery, when the moral compass of a nation spins like a broken fan in harmattan wind.
Look around!
Our hospitals cry for medicine while politicians build cathedrals of excess.
Our youth wander without work while their leaders wander abroad with wallets of the nation’s wealth.
Our schools crumble,
our currency bleeds,
and our people beg in a land flowing with gold, cocoa, and oil.
Ghana has not run out of resources; it has run out of shame.
But I refuse to surrender hope.
Because nations don’t die when they are broke, they die when their people stop believing they can be honest again.
We can change this story.
We can rewrite the narrative.
The cure for grotesquery is not outrage, it is awakening.
We must teach truth again in our schools.
We must reward integrity again in our politics.
We must make corruption shameful again,
and leadership sacred again.
So, when next you hear laughter echoing from the banquet of corruption, remember that it is not joy.
It is decay wearing the mask of humor.
And when they ask, Who’s to laugh?
let your heart reply, “Not I, not anymore.”
For Ghana shall rise again, not by miracles, but by men and women who refuse to be entertained by their own suffering.
Let the laughter of thieves end, and let the conscience of a nation begin to speak once more.
God bless our homeland, Ghana.
And may truth, justice, and conscience once again walk her streets.
