The Lagoon’s Revenge, the Shouting Priest, and the Camel at the Primary Needle
By Dr. Ato Kwamena Danso · 30 January 2026 · Politics
The Republic is currently a symphony of falling bricks and rising political temperatures. As we approach the end of January 2026, the silence of the lagoons has been replaced by the roar of NADMO excavators. After decades of "looking the other way," the government has finally remembered that water, unlike our politicians, never forgets its original home. The demolition along the Kpeshie and Tse Addo lagoons has been a masterclass in Ghanaian irony. It took decades of annual floods and a mounting death toll for authorities to realize that mansions shouldn't be built where fish used to play. The most baffling part, Osagyefo, is the "legal illegality" of it all. People have built sprawling estates on unapproved lands, yet they were somehow legally connected to the national grid. It seems our utility companies have a very "inclusive" policy: they don't care if your house is on a waterway or a cloud, as long as you pay for the light and water. Families are now displaced, watching their life savings turn into rubble because some official years ago preferred a "brown envelope" to a building permit. The exercise even took on a spiritual dimension. NADMO didn't just stop at mansions; they leveled the structure of a fetish priest who was seen gesticulating wildly, perhaps trying to summon a divine "injunction" that never came. Even the gods, it seems, must now produce a land title deed to avoid the bulldozer. We wait for people to die every year before we react, and now that we are reacting, the "aha" moment feels more like a "too little, too late" tragedy. But while the dust settles in the lagoons, it is rising in the political arena. Tomorrow, the NPP goes to the polls to elect its flagbearer, and the air is thick with the scent of "incentives." It takes me back some 30 years to Sunyani, a little boy standing near Christ the King Hall with a pan of ice water on my head, hoping to make a few cedis. I remember the air then, he tension between J.A. Kufuor and Nana Addo, who supposedly had all the money to spend on delegates. It’s funny how the more things change, the more the "delegate's pocket" remains the most important constituency. Tomorrow is the big showdown, and the consensus on the street is rather poetic: it appears easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for Ken Agyapong to navigate the narrow, digital passage of these NPP primaries. Between the "Apostle of Showdown" and the "Digital Man," the delegates have a choice between a loud storm and a calculated algorithm. Whether the "Showdown" can survive the "System" is a question that will be answered before the sun sets tomorrow. So long, Ato KD