A colleague drops a link into the thread: _Government ready to partner Zoomlion to drive sustainable development._ The headline lands like a cold, familiar stone. I click. The prose is polished, the talking points neat: partnership, job creation, climate resilience, national service. The machinery of public reassurance hums in the background — ministers, thanksgiving services, plaques and cameras. The narrative is immaculate.
Then someone scrolls up and posts a comment under the link, one line that makes the room go quiet:
👆🏿 “`And the beat goes on….. Interesting – he’s got them all in his pocket. Sadly. There’s got to be a reason no government can let him go. He’s got them all. 😊“`
That little string of sarcasm, pity and resigned amusement is the true headline.
I sit with it. The article is the official choreography; the comment is the public’s shorthand for the choreography’s method. Between them lies the story I have been trying to track for years: not merely a company doing business, but an ecosystem of contracts, conveniences and compromises that makes one firm indispensable in practice if not in law.
Reading the government’s “we will partner” language feels performative because the architecture behind it has been visible for a long time — a steady funneling of state funds, national-level contracts written in ways that concentrate scope, and employment programmes that convert social policy into vendor dependence. The YEA sanitation module, the DACF routings, the fumigation deals that appear on paper even when districts are dormant — these aren’t glitches. They are the scaffolding of durable dominance.
The comment nails a cynical truth: dominance in Ghana’s sanitation economy is political fuel as much as it is commercial success. You do not become indispensable by being merely competent; you become indispensable by making yourself the easiest, most politically painless option for every succeeding administration. You become the channel through which messy responsibilities are outsourced, accountability deferred, and electoral anxieties pacified. And when that arrangement exists year after year, every new government learns — quietly — to keep the system humming rather than to untangle it.
Why does no government “let him go”? The reasons are banal and powerful: short political horizons; the fear of immediate chaos in city streets; the material reality that a national vendor can be called on, fast, to demonstrate action before an election; the private financing and equipment that one large firm brings to bear; and, crucially, the social optics of jobs. Even when auditors point at leaks and parliament presses for answers, the operational muscles that keep streets swept remain a blunt political instrument. Better to rebadge the relationship as partnership than to risk the spectacle of uncollected refuse and angry communities.
I resent the inevitability the comment expresses. Resignation is an accomplice. That resigned smiley face — the little, almost guilty emoji tucked at the end — says: we all know, but what can be done? The answer is that plenty can be done, if the incentive architecture is altered: unbundle the services; devolve procurement to districts; attach finance to competition and not to familiar names; separate labour policy from vendor rent; put data in public hands. Those are technocratic solutions, boring enough to be politically survivable. They are also, precisely, how you make monopoly unprofitable without theatrics.
For me and others who want to be serious challengers, the lesson is tactical: be useful where Zoomlion’s grip is weakest — data, MRV, specialised recycling streams, modular plants — and be the clean hand that institutions can adopt with confidence. The bell-ringers are not the loudest; they are the ones who supply the pilot contracts, the audited evidence, and the financing that attaches to transparent metrics. They make the transition seductive rather than punitive.
Tonight, after the link and the comment and the inevitable stream of “agree” and “it’s complicated” replies, I feel a familiar professional impatience. These problems have been diagnosed. They have been rehearsed in audits and committee reports. What is missing is the institutional sequence that makes reform survivable: a district pilot that demonstrably beats the incumbent on cost and service, an auditor’s stamp of validation, and a financier’s willingness to scale what works. When those three things line up, the high politics follows; until then, the beat goes on.
I archive the link. I copy the comment into my notes — not for irony’s sake but to remind myself how ordinary the acceptance of monopoly has become. There is no scandal in resignation; there is only the quiet labor of policy design and political sequencing that can translate irritation into reform. I will draft that pilot tender tonight. If the regime of convenience is to end, it will not end with rage. It will end with an irresistible alternative.
Quod omnes sciunt, nemo corrigit
What everyone knows, no one corrects .
— R.
