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

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.

A closing word, and a fairer one It would be dishonest to pretend every person in Ghanaian public life fits this portrait.

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.