Galamsey Republic, Digital Dominion: How to Pay for Progress You Don’t Understand

An African Chronicle in the Key of the Ancestors.

Sometimes I astound myself with perfect recollection. It is a curse inherited from my grandmother’s line—the memory that remembers itself. This morning, as the light settled on my desk like old dust, I read an article that tore open a sealed chamber of memory. Ten years ago—on this same day, as if ordained by some cosmic repetition—I wrote an essay condemning the intelligence of the Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors—the Metha—the spectral men and women who now pilot the ghost ship of Africa’s nations.

I remember how I had charged them, with the fury of one freshly anointed by the Ancestors, to print their own Cedis in Ghana. Yet even now, as the rivers run brown with galamsey sludge, Ghana’s money is still born in the belly of the United Kingdom, flown across the sea like a prodigal returning with foreign breath. The Metha, frightened of their own shadow, still worship the engraved signatures of their former masters. I had urged them to anchor their currency in the gold sleeping beneath their feet—without disturbing the soil where the bones of our forebears whisper.

Back then, impostors rose against me—sorcerers of the blue-eyed arts, whose intelligence was conferred not by enlightenment but by inheritance. They were graduates of foreign temples where men learn to despise their mothers’ tongues. Their laughter still echoes in the archives of my recollections. I have kept their words, like a priest preserves the screams of spirits that refuse to be chained to the bottom of the ocean.

Today, their madness has ripened. Galamsey—the illegal mining they once swore to end—has devoured the country whole. The Metha’s agents and their NGO-certified accomplices from the imperial metropoles now dance upon a land hollowed out like a termite mound. The forests have become bald as skulls, the rivers taste of metal and despair, and the food on our tables bears the chemical aftertaste of the Metha’s ambition. Even the graves of the Ancestors have been desecrated; the earth exhales the scent of their disquiet. Thunder cracks not from the heavens but from beneath the ground, where the souls of miners and martyrs wrestle for the right to haunt us.

It was this new article that summoned my recollection—an echo calling to another echo. For what could be more diabolical than the Metha begging the colonial master to print their money? What could be more absurd than that same Metha, now baptized in digital gospel, proclaiming salvation through digitization?

They say they wish to leap into modernity by digitizing the nation—not by building roads, or lighting homes, or cleaning the filth from their harbors. No, they believe salvation lies in the circuitry of strangers. They dream of a 24-Hour Economy rising from power outages, of paperless miracles preached by paperless minds. They do not even dream of printing their own Cedi; they only wish to scan its ghost.

To digitize their wallets and stop there would be sin enough. But no, the Metha’s imagination is always an abyss without bottom. They have summoned strangers again—those same pale-faced alchemists—to digitize the health of the living. Over one hundred million American dollars have been sacrificed to this new priesthood, with fifty million more pledged to ensure that the pulse of the Ghanaian citizen beats forever on foreign servers.

It is an irony worthy of the Ancestors’ laughter: a man pays the piper and is still commanded to dance to another’s tune. For data—like gold—is the modern soul. And the Metha, blind and dazzled, have traded that soul for applause. The strangers collect our data, mine our ailments, and sell them back to us as cures. They feed private hospitals, pharmaceutical lords, and digital prophets with the suffering of the poor, prescribing both the sickness and the salvation at once.

The Metha before modernity is a tragic farce—a footballer before an open goal, six yards away, who kicks the ball not into the net but into the sun. They fumble because ignorance has become their inheritance, and kleptomania their religion. They do not know that digitization without sovereignty is a spell cast backward. And they do not care to know, for their blindness is the condition of their wealth.

So the Metha in charge of the money quarrel like spoiled children in a dusty courtyard. Their audits come back blank; their reports read like confessions of the damned. One hundred million dollars gone, and still they ask where the data lives, who tends it, and what it costs to borrow it back. The spectacle is so grand that even the gods of irony avert their eyes.

They could, of course, repent. They could admit that the Ancestors’ intelligence has long departed from their veins. But kleptomaniacs do not confess; they canonize their theft. Narcissists do not learn; they mirror their masters until the reflection consumes them. The Metha insist still—each one—that if left alone in a room full of American dollars, they could leave without touching a bill.

And yet, when the door closes behind them, it is not the room that vanishes. It is the country.