I am worried. You should be worried.
Ghana today, April 16, 2026, is not materially different from the same date in 1979. Our GDP may be higher and our communication platforms now digital and more widespread, but the fear is identical. The atmosphere of silence now is absolute. The air of hopelessness is thicker. Today, you cannot critique this government without risking arrest, or the very machinery of the state being turned against you.
The NDC returned to power with a philosophy of predatory precision. The Judiciary was their primary target – and they executed the mission with chilling alacrity.
Within thirty days of assuming office, they set in motion the coup that daggered Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo out of office and out of their way. They did not wait. They did not hesitate. They bypassed the sanctity of due process. What was her crime? Torkornoo was too honest. Too independent. Too faithful to the constitution.
They moved with a raw dagger to decapitate the third arm of government, ensuring no bench remained that might dare to stand in their way. It was, and remains, a mission of total, unadulterated control. This was achieved by what they called “balancing the bench” – recruiting, promoting, and positioning NDC loyalists and rogues to sensitive judicial roles as Judges, Justices and Law Lords. Holy Shit.
People are pretending everything is normal.
It is not.
Ghana’s state today is more precarious than it was in April 1979 – the month before the first tremors of the Rawlings era shook the foundations of this nation. The signs were everywhere then; they are everywhere now. The difference now is the cowardice of the pretence and the depth of the silence.
Every judge is more afraid than he was before the event of June 12, 1982. They know the history. They remember Justice Cecilia Koranteng-Addo, torn from her breastfeeding child. This regime does not need to issue a formal threat; the history of the NDC’s lineage threatens for them. Every gavel that falls today does so under the shadow of that memory. When a political administration commences its tenure by violently removing the head of the judiciary – tantamount to a biological killing – the message is sent and received by everyone on the Bench: The Law is dead.
The Old Book says a second coming is a blessing. But Mahama’s second coming is a catastrophe. A curse to good governance. A blow to rule of law. And a burial to freedom of speech.
Under Mahama’s Reset, every journalist of high voice has been bought, and those who cannot be bought are being erased through fear. Multimedia, once the independent fortress of private broadcasting, has been reduced to a whimpering shadow. They publish truth at noon only to delete it by 1:00 PM – a shameful, sixty-minute lifespan for the facts. It is that bad.
Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have been gagged through “The Deal” – board appointments, diplomatic passports, and state contracts. The price of silence is high, and the NDC pays it with our children’s future. Even the pastors, who once stood against the previous administration, have discovered the “grace” of cemetery-grade silence, trading their prophetic voices for Jubilee House invitations and seasonal hampers. Damn.
The Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) is being strangled in broad daylight. The Attorney General now argues the OSP has no independent interest in its own existence, and the courts, from the High Court to the Supreme Court, cowed and trembling, have agreed.
Meanwhile, our water bodies run red with the blood of the earth. Our forests are mere steppes, stripped and sold. GoldBod remains a black hole where $214 million vanishes every nine months. $1.27 billion has been transferred into private pockets in a single, unchecked “gold flip.” Freedom of speech, guaranteed under our Constitution, has become the most expensive luxury in the life of any critic of John Mahama’s administration. Just cartooning Mahama can send you to jail!
Ghana is silent, pretending everything is normal. It is not. Ghana is not in the ICU. Ghana is on the slab.
The autopsy has begun and is being conducted by the hyenas who killed it.
J. A. Sarbah
