Markets, Strikes and Bus Preachers
By Anonymous · 9 October 2026 · Politics
Greetings from afar, where the roads are smooth enough that one forgets to pray on them. I hope this letter finds Osagyefo and the elders in good health and in better spirits than the rest of us at home.
I write because a few matters have become so strange that they deserve a royal laugh before they get a royal solution. I set them out below, one wonder at a time.
We were promised a 24-hour market, Osagyefo. What we got is the same market with a new signboard: "District Model Market." It seems the 24 hours were not added to the trading day; they were spent repainting the name.
Our traders do not sell signboards. They need light, security and the longer trading hours they were promised. A market cannot work round the clock if even its name has clocked out. I humbly ask Osagyefo to find out which of the two we actually have, and when the other one is coming.
With the teachers on strike, our children have found a new subject: eating every school supply their parents bought. The provisions meant to last the term are gone in a week, and the books are untouched. Our elders were right that the devil finds work for idle hands. Right now he is very busy in our homes.
What puzzles me, Osagyefo, is the arithmetic. We hear of gold money flowing and a Big Push rolling across the country. Yet all that gold and all that pushing could not push teachers' salaries an inch. If the Big Push can move roads, surely a small push can move a payslip. I ask Osagyefo to add his voice so the teachers return to class soon. At this rate, by the time the strike is over, the gari and shitto will be finished too.
And with respect, Osagyefo, a minister of education who cannot keep the teachers in the classroom has failed his own exam. The children have been sent home; it is only fair that the Education Minister be shown the exit door too.
Preaching in moving vehicles is now banned. So the one man on the bus asking God to carry us safely over these roads, in these buses, has been told to sit down. Osagyefo, on some of our roads that prayer is the only working safety feature.
Meanwhile, the medicine seller still boards freely. In one breath he sells a cure for malaria, waist pain, low sperm count and bad luck, and most of it has never seen a lab. The preacher risked our patience. The medicine seller risks our kidneys. Somehow it is the preacher who got banned.
With unemployment this high, the preacher is not the danger. At least with his small offering he can break bread at the end of the day, and nobody falls sick from a sermon. If anything must leave our buses, let it be the unverified drugs, not the prayers.
Osagyefo, I laugh so that I do not cry. Each of these has a simple fix: a market that keeps its promise, teachers who are paid, and a bus where prayer is welcome and fake medicine is not. When Osagyefo speaks, even sleeping markets wake up, so I trust these words are in the right hands.
So long,
Ato_KD