By Richard DABLAH
(richarddablah@gmail.com)
I took this Sunday to scan the news, drift through radio chatter, and listen to the voice clips circulating from the week. Somewhere between the heated debates and the half-serious laughter, one phrase stood out and refused to leave my mind: “We are going to dechemicalize the river.”
It was the EPA Executive Director speaking, and the reaction was instant. On NewsFile, a panelist burst out laughing, asking how a whole EPA boss could talk about “dechemicalizing water when water itself is a chemical.” The studio cracked up; social media did what it does best. Within hours, “dechemicalize” had become both a punchline and a metaphor for something larger — our uneasy dance between science, politics, and public trust.
But I didn’t laugh right away. The humor carried an undertone. Behind the meme was a real problem: poisoned rivers, dying fish, and villages drawing from streams that now taste like the residue of a battery. Galamsey has turned entire watersheds into chemical experiments. When an official says “dechemicalize,” she is not so much misusing language as she is struggling to name the impossible — how to reverse a damage that has become systemic.
Still, words matter. Language is not decoration; it’s the scaffolding of understanding. A public official cannot afford imprecision when the issue is already clouded by distrust. Yet, perhaps it’s too easy to mock from a distance. The scientist is trying to communicate urgency, but in a country where technical speech must pass through layers of political theatre and popular media, something always gets lost — sometimes the meaning, sometimes the dignity.
And maybe that’s the real story. The laughter is not cruelty; it’s a coping mechanism, the only way we can face absurdity without losing our sanity. We laugh not because we don’t care, but because we do — and we no longer know how to express our frustration in the language of straight seriousness. Ghanaian humor, after all, has always been our most refined form of civic philosophy.
Still, the question lingers: can a river truly be “dechemicalized”? Technically, no. It can be treated, filtered, coaxed into a lesser toxicity, but never fully restored to its original state. Heavy metals don’t vanish; they migrate, settle, and return. The most advanced nanoliquids may capture some contaminants, but they cannot undo the moral pollution that allowed such destruction in the first place.
So as I sat through the voice clips — half amused, half troubled — I began to think that maybe “dechemicalize” isn’t such a bad word after all. It captures something of our national habit: our desire to fix with slogans what we refuse to fix with systems. We rename decay and call it innovation. We baptize our guilt in science and hope it comes out clean.
By the end of the broadcast, the laughter had softened into silence. Somewhere in the background, the rivers still flowed — dark, slow, carrying the memory of what they once were.
“Aqua non mentitur.”
Water does not lie.
