He cannot dance.
Everyone in the crowd knows it.
His hips move a half-beat behind the drums, his arms flail where they should sway, and still, he dances; because in Ghana, the politician who will not dance is a politician who does not care.
That, at least, is the illusion. And it is a profitable one.
Ask yourself why grown men and women who have never set foot near a dance floor suddenly discover rhythm the moment a microphone and a crowd appear.
The answer has nothing to do with music and everything to do with marketing.
Eat with them. Dance with them. Drink with them.
Show them you care.
These are not gestures of affection.
They are condiments in a confusion potion, stirred and served to voters every four years, and Ghanaians keep drinking it.
The choreography works.
That is the tragedy.
A Season of Theatre
Ghana’s campaign trail has become the country’s most expensive stage production, and the Fourth Republic has never lacked for drama.
If comedy alone could grow a country’s Gross Dometic Product (GDP), Ghana would long ago have joined the ranks of the world’s wealthiest nations, because every election season delivers an overdose of performance with no script and no purpose beyond the ballot.
The rallies are choreographed to the last handshake. Every event is dressed up as an act of service to the people, when it is, in truth, an investment pitch; and every pitch has a return the public never sees coming.
Behind the free wax print, the polling-agent envelopes, the fuel money and the “small something” pressed into a delegate's palm, there is a ledger.
And ledgers, unlike dance moves, do not lie.
The Investor
A young friend of mine – sharp, ambitious, and fully aware of what he was signing up for, once contested a parliamentary primary. He paid over 600 delegates GH₵500 each, on top of half a piece of Hollandaise wax print for every single one of them.
When the cash ran short, he told me, quite matter-of-factly, that he would sell his brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser to close the gap.
That is not campaigning.
That is an investment round, and every investor, from the village susu contributor to the sophisticated angel investor, wants the same thing in the end: return on investment.
The angel investor may accept equity instead of cash today, but make no mistake, ROI still sits at the top of the term sheet.
Now imagine my friend wins and becomes a deputy minister. His first order of business will not be your pothole, your hospital bill, or your child’s school fees.
It will be his own balance sheet, recovering what he spent, with interest, before the next election cycle resets the clock and the whole expensive performance begins again.
This is the honest answer to a question millions of Ghanaian voters keep asking: why doesn’t the ‘honourable’ pick up the phone anymore?
Why do text messages to the Members of Parliament (MP's) office disappear into silence?
It is not arrogance. It is arithmetic.
The ‘honourable’ is busy servicing a debt, and you were never a line item in that budget.
Political patronage in Ghana runs on a simple, cynical logic: politicians thrive on collective deprivation, not collective progress.
An economically empowered electorate has no need to trail behind a “big man” waiting for scraps.
A hungry, dependent electorate, on the other hand, will follow him anywhere.
That is why the new seat comes with a new circle of friends.
Gone are the days of the GH₵50 handout or the promise of a National Health Insurance card, those transactions are for the voters who remain within reach.
The new friends operate on a different plane entirely: big contracts, bigger deals, and a status the average constituent will never be invited to share.
Poverty, in this arrangement, is not an unfortunate side effect of politics.
It is the business model. A hungry electorate is a loyal electorate, and loyalty, not development, is what gets a politician re-elected.
The antidote is uncomfortable but simple: a gainfully employed citizen does not need to be bribed into voting.
For that citizen, the ballot is no longer a commodity for sale to the highest bidder during what has, cynically, come to be known as the “cocoa season” of politics.
It is simply a civic duty, performed because it matters, not because someone paid for it.
The next time an incoming MP takes to the stage and dances, off-beat, breathless, grinning for the cameras, resist the urge to read affection into it.
He is not there because he loves you.
He is there sowing seeds he fully intends to harvest, and the first beneficiaries of that harvest will be his household, not yours.
Everything else – your calls, your concerns, your community – is secondary, filed away until the next campaign season makes you useful again.
Because once the votes are counted, you are no longer a constituent.
You are a number that has already served its purpose in the booth.
And numbers, once counted, do not get callbacks.
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