Handcuffs won’t cure it: The incentive behind Ghana’s ‘insult economy’

There is a particular sound and posturing that announce election season in Ghana. Unfortunately, it is not the rustle of manifestos being read, nor the hum of policy being debated in our public spaces. It is the rising register of grown men and women on morning radio and political platforms hurling adjectives at one another as though invectives were a public good. Listen long enough and a pattern emerges. The louder the messaging, the emptier the message. The more indignant the tone, the more ignoble the intent.

This is the theatre of the Ghanaian political class, and after decades of the Fourth Republic it has hardened into a genre with its own conventions: the pre-scripted fury, the deflection, the tribal dog-whistle disguised as regional balance, the promise so extravagant that no one, least of all the person making it, expects it to be honoured. The tragedy is not that Ghanaians cannot see through it. It is that they have been asked to see through it so many times that cynicism now passes for citizenship.

The cult of the insult

Somewhere along the way, the country’s political conversation traded persuasion for provocation. The “serial caller,” the paid and acerbic tongue wielding propagandist whose job is to defend the indefensible on air, has become a fixture as recognisable as the constituency executive. Their currency is the insult and abrasive language. Opponents are not merely wrong; they are wicked, greedy, unpatriotic, agents of some shadowy scheme. Nuance is treated as weakness. To concede a single good point to the other side is to betray one’s own. Indeed, some went as far as rationalising and regularising the practice through the establishment of “Propaganda Secretariats.”

The effect on the national temper is corrosive. Young people entering public life learn early that the reward goes not to the one who reasons best but to the one who wounds most memorably with words. Talk-show hosts, dependent on the heat these voices generate, indulge them. And so a machinery of manufactured anger runs day and night, consuming airtime that might have been spent explaining why the price of a bag of cement has doubled, or where the money for a much-heralded road actually went.

That the tide occasionally turns is little comfort. In recent months the courts and the police have begun to move against some of the loudest offenders, a certain Camilla Alhassan among those arrested and convicted over insulting and threatening language, one of several such cases to reach the news. An arrest here and there may satisfy the appetite for a headline, but it treats the symptom while the disease flourishes untouched. The question no charge sheet answers is the one that matters most: “why do they do it at all?**”

Why they do it: the economy of the insult

The answer is not madness or mere bad character. It is incentive. The foot-soldiers of vitriol behave rationally, in the narrow and corrosive way the system has taught them to. They insult because insulting pays. They have watched, year after year, as the most abusive voices of one cycle are rewarded in the next, handed appointments, board seats, contracts, or simply the standing that comes from being useful to power. The lesson is impossible to miss: loyalty proven through aggression is a currency that the party, once in office, will honour.

So the aspiring communicator does the arithmetic. Reasoned commentary earns respect but rarely a reward; a well-aimed insult that goes viral earns the attention of those who dispense patronage. Having seen others cash in for precisely this conduct, the newcomer reaches for the same weapon. The insult, in other words, is not a lapse in the system. It is a job application. And every time a past offender is quietly elevated rather than sidelined, the political class advertises the vacancy afresh.

This is why arrests alone will never cure it. As long as the reward structure rewards the wound, the supply of those willing to inflict it will never run dry. Punish one caller and 10 more will calculate that the prize is still worth the risk. The rot begins not in the studio or on social media platforms but in the reward and the reward is set by the very politicians who then feign horror at the noise.

Promises as performanc****e

Every campaign season the covenant is renewed. Factories in every district. Dams in every village. Free this, subsidised that, one of some grand thing for every unit of administration. The scale of the pledges has grown so vast that they function less as commitments and more as incantations; words spoken not to be kept but to be heard.

When the ballots are counted and power changes or endures, the incantations quietly expire. The factory becomes a signboard. The dam becomes a shallow trench that fills with rain and disappears with the dry season. The politico, unembarrassed, simply refreshes the script for the next cycle, confident that the electorate’s memory is short and its options narrow. And they are not wrong about the options.

The comfortable duopoly

Two parties have shared power for a generation, alternating in an arrangement so stable that it has begun to resemble a settlement between elites rather than a contest of ideas. On the essentials, the size of the political purse, the appetite for patronage, the reflexive protection of one’s own, the difference between them is often harder to find than the campaign rhetoric would suggest.

Both, in office, discover the same enthusiasm for creating ministries and appointing deputies. Both find the state coffers more accommodating than they promised in opposition. Both denounce the abuse of incumbency until the moment they inherit it. The voter, offered a choice between two versions of the same instinct, is left to pick the lesser familiarity. This is not democracy at its best; it is a duopoly wearing democracy’s clothes.

The economics of self-reward

Perhaps nothing so neatly captures the ethic of the political class as the culture of self-remuneration. Ex gratia payments, generous end-of-service arrangements, allowances stacked upon allowances the machinery of the state, so often described as broke when a nurse asks for her posting or a teacher for study leave, becomes remarkably solvent when the beneficiaries are the office-holders themselves.

There is a moral incoherence here that no amount of oratory can dissolve. A leadership that lectures the citizen on sacrifice while cushioning itself against every discomfort forfeits the authority to lead by example. The message that reaches the ordinary Ghanaian is unmistakable, and it is the most honest message the political class ever sends: the rules are for you, not for us.

What the shouting drowns out

The cost of all this is not merely aesthetic. Every hour of manufactured outrage is an hour not spent on the questions that decide whether a nation thrives and how to industrialize beyond slogans, how to widen a tax base without crushing the small trader, how to build institutions strong enough to outlast the individuals who staff them. The noise is not incidental to the underperformance. It is, in part, the instrument of it, a smoke that keeps the electorate coughing so it cannot see clearly.

Ghana is not short of talent, decency, or ideas. Its markets teem with enterprise, its universities with ambition, its civil society with people who ask the right questions and refuse the easy bribe of tribe. The problem has never been the country. The problem is a political class that has confused volume with vision and durability with legitimacy.

A closing word, and a fairer one

It would be dishonest to pretend every person in Ghanaian public life fits this portrait. There are legislators who read the bills, district officers who show up, appointees who leave office no richer than they entered it. They exist, and they deserve to be named and multiplied rather than ground down by the culture around them. Any honest account must concede, too, that voters are not blameless that a market for insults survives because there are still those who buy, and that ethnic loyalty is a temptation offered to citizens as much as by them.

But the greater share of responsibility sits, as it must, with those who hold the greater share of power. The remedy is not more indignation; the country has a surplus of that. It is a slow, unglamorous rebuilding of the covenant between the governed and those who govern: fewer promises, better kept; less shouting, more accounting; a politics measured not by how fiercely it can attack an opponent but by how quietly it can improve a life.

Until then, the sound of the season will remain the same: loud, aggrieved, and signifying too little. Ghana deserves a politics worth listening to. It is still waiting for one worth believing.

About the authors; (L-R) William Wallace Tamakloe & Benjamin Joe Danso are Associate PR Directors at Touchpoint Magna Carta. You can reach them via email; bjdanso1@gmail.com, w.wtamakloe@gmail.com.