By Richard DABLAH
(richard.dablah@gmail.com)
There are moments when a nation pauses not because it understands what has happened, but because it is stunned by the language used to describe it. Today was one of those moments.
I encountered a graphic carrying the weight of accusation and the theatre of certainty. A red banner screamed NEWS ALERT. A calm portrait anchored the storm. And beneath it, a sentence so surreal it felt allegorical: a political party accused of importing “mallams” from Niger to orchestrate bees to attack a political meeting, leading to death. Bees. Borders. Politics. Death.
It reads like myth. It circulates like fact.
What struck me first was not whether the claim is true or false. It was how easily it travels, how quickly it enters our bloodstream, and how readily it recruits our fears. In one breath, the image collapses politics, religion, migration, and violence into a single narrative grenade. It does not ask the citizen to think. It dares the citizen to feel.
This is how modern political conflict increasingly speaks: compressed, visual, incendiary. The medium is no longer merely the message; it is the accelerant. A long investigation would bore. A sober press conference would lose the algorithm. But bees? Bees arrest the mind. Bees demand attention. Bees bypass reason.
And yet, this is precisely where danger lies.
To invoke “mallams from Niger” is not a neutral description. It summons centuries of suspicion around faith, foreignness, and the fear of infiltration. It converts porous borders into moral fault lines. It risks turning ordinary religious practitioners and migrants into symbolic weapons in a political war they did not choose. Long after the truth is clarified—if it ever is—the residue of suspicion remains.
If the allegation is literal, then we are confronted with a chilling possibility: that our politics has descended into the realm of unconventional violence, where even nature is conscripted. If it is metaphorical or exaggerated, then we face a different crisis: a willingness to sacrifice accuracy for impact, truth for virality. Either way, the implications are grave.
What unsettles me most is the institutional echo. When statements like these appear to carry official authority, the burden of proof becomes heavier, not lighter. Words spoken—or attributed—by those near power do not merely inform; they authorize. They shape public imagination. They license outrage. They can also license retaliation.
Ghana’s political tradition has long prided itself on noisy campaigns that end quietly at the ballot box. But this kind of rhetoric chips away at that inheritance. It trains citizens to see opponents not as rivals, but as existential threats. It reframes elections as battles between the pure and the infiltrated, the native and the foreign, the righteous and the occult.
And in that framing, anything becomes possible.
I do not write this to defend any party. I write it to defend something more fragile: our capacity for restraint. Our willingness to verify before we vilify. Our courage to insist that politics, however fierce, must not become a theatre where truth is optional and fear is currency.
If someone died, the truth must be known in full, not in fragments optimized for social media. If crimes were committed, they must be investigated with evidence, not metaphors. And if this story is exaggerated or misrepresented, then the harm already done must be acknowledged, not quietly ignored.
Because today it is bees. Tomorrow it will be something else—more believable, more combustible.
A society does not unravel all at once. It frays at the edges of language. It corrodes when spectacle replaces scrutiny and accusation replaces accountability. The question before us is not simply what happened at Kpandai. It is what kind of political culture we are willing to normalize, one headline at a time.
History will not ask how viral our claims were. It will ask how careful we were with the truth when emotions were high and the stakes were higher.
And whether, in moments like this, we chose to think before we shared.
*Falsitas celeriter currit; veritas tarde, sed firmiter.*
( _Falsehood runs swiftly; truth walks slowly, but surely._ )
