Is it still same Ghana?

After my study sojourn to Canada, I returned home with a quiet question on my mind—is this still the same Ghana I left behind three years ago, or a country learning to become something else?

The answer did not come at once. It revealed itself slowly, in the dust hanging over our roads and in the noise of excavators tearing into old asphalt, signs that something beneath the familiar surface had begun to shift.

The political architecture feels different, as if the country has entered a season of deliberate reconstruction under what President John Mahama calls the reset agenda.

While in Canada, I kept reading about the Big Push Agenda—a promise to open the country through roads, highways, and corridors that would bind the regions together like veins carrying fresh blood. It’s manifesting everywhere.

From major highways to inner roads, machines now growl where silence once stretched for miles.

The President has pleaded for patience, asking Ghanaians to endure the inconvenience for the next two years while the rebuilding continues, and indeed the nation now lives inside that plea.

Everywhere there is dust—thick, stubborn dust settling on clothes, on faces, and even on tempers.

The earth is being turned over, old surfaces are broken, and new paths are forced into existence.

It is messy, loud, uncomfortable, and sometimes exhausting, but it is real, and impossible to ignore.

Commuters move about like unwilling participants in a long and unavoidable trial. 

Yet amid all this movement, the people remain the same—resilient, talkative, hopeful, suspicious, and endlessly patient—carrying daily life as if change may come slowly, but life itself must never stop.

In this shared inconvenience, the old inequalities reveal themselves.

Those who matter most in society glide through the chaos behind rolled-up windows, sealed inside vehicles cooled by powerful air conditioners, untouched by the dust that the ordinary commuter must breathe without choice.

One cannot help but think that a little water sprinkled on these wounded roads would have given the struggling pedestrian at least the dignity of clean air.

I overheard a frustrated commuter shout in anger after a speeding, fully air-conditioned V-B vehicle splashed muddy water on him: “The politician will never change; it doesn’t matter which party is in power.”  

In that moment, the dust, the heat, and the splash of dirty water felt like a summary of the distance between those who govern and those who endure. Beyond the cities, another sound competes with the noise of road construction—the distant echoes of galamsey, growing louder the farther one travels from the urban centres.  

And just like the dust on the roads, the arguments around it never settle. The politics around galamsey has become a strange form of equalisation.

If the National Democratic Congress (NDC) once amplified the galamsey crisis to weaken the NPP, then today, to some of its critics, any gains made under the current administration must not be acknowledged as achievement.

Everything must cancel everything, so that no side is allowed the comfort of credit.  

Closely tied to this is the debate over cocoa price hikes.

As expected, the opposition feeds the discontent for political point-scoring, while the government finds itself constantly explaining, negotiating, and reasoning with farmers and the wider public. 

In the end, the argument becomes as familiar as the roadside noise of daily life. 

Nothing, it seems, changes as quickly as we expect.

Fuel prices may be reduced, yet transport fares hardly come down.

The ordinary passenger still pays the same coins, sometimes more, as if the pump and the lorry station live in different economies.

Even staple foods refuse to listen to the language of relief.  

The ever-reliable kenkey, once the comfort of the common man, now sells at GH¢50, sometimes GH¢70, depending on where one stands to buy. And it is not alone—almost everything else moves in the same stubborn direction.

And so, the streets continue to breathe with their old rhythm—hawkers calling out prices, trotro mates shouting destinations, traders bargaining without end—as if time itself has refused to move too far from what we have always known, even while the country insists it is changing and speaking of reforms, the marketplace answers in the dialect of survival 

Governance and the pressures

While abroad, I also read about the pledge to reduce the size of government — 60 ministers, they said. Now I hear it is 57. In a country where promises often evaporate after victory speeches, I returned home to find the numbers have indeed gone down, and for once, a campaign promise has not dissolved into thin air.

However, the backlash and complaints have been strangely intense—almost excruciating to someone like me, returning fresh to this latest governance structure. I hear stories that disturb optimism.

Donor support meant for distressed primary schools is said to be sitting on the desks of officials, delayed by bureaucracy and indifference.  

The Gold Board, described as a potential gamechanger for the economy, is already surrounded by murmurs of discontent, with party supporters accusing those in charge of shutting their doors to the very people who stood with them in opposition. 

Some claim phone calls go unanswered; numbers have been changed, and familiar allies—journalists included, who once offered them a platform in difficult times—now feel pushed aside.

Among party followers, a cynical phrase is beginning to circulate: “They are waiting for 2028.”

What exactly does that mean; no one fully explains. Perhaps time itself will provide the answer. 

Construction beyond the roads

Our political discourse, too, seems caught in this reset—perhaps the hardest hit of all.

The nation feels more sharply divided than ever, as if every idea must first pass through the filter of party colours before it is allowed to breathe.

Nothing the government does is good enough for the opposition, and nothing the opposition says is trusted by the government, leaving us in a trapped cycle where progress is argued over as much as it is pursued. 

Even where the 24-hour economy begins to take shape, stretching activity beyond the old limits of day and night, the argument refuses to rest.

The minority in Parliament speaks as though the nation has been deceived, while the government insists the country is only beginning to wake up. 

So, is it still the same Ghana? Yes… and no.

It remains the same land of patience and complaint, of hope and doubt, of endurance that sometimes borders on stubbornness.