By Richard DABLAH
I woke to a morning crowded with headlines, yet none of them carried the weight that pressed on my chest. A brief clip, just a coach speaking of rituals after a defeat, had already been churned through the country’s circuits of irony and indignation. Some laughed as if superstition were a private joke. Others nodded with an almost weary recognition. What struck me was not the coach, nor the laughter, but the quiet disquiet that threaded beneath it, the sense that a nation still moves between worlds that seldom meet, one shaped by training, institutions, and expertise, the other by fear, inheritance, and the raw need for control in a precarious economy.
Episodes like this expose more than personal belief. They reveal the fractures of a society navigating uneven modernization. Our public spheres demand competence, but our social realities often deny the conditions that make competence possible. When schools struggle, hospitals limp, wages stagnate, and political trust evaporates, the human mind reaches instinctively for other instruments. Ritual becomes a grammar for uncertainty, a way of naming what the state cannot fix and what the market refuses to dignify.
A charm is not only a charm. It is a micro-economy of hope.
Those who mock the coach fail to see the socioeconomic archaeology beneath the gesture. For the worker who cannot rely on a minimum wage that feeds a family, for the young graduate juggling skill and futility, for the mother who prays as the ambulance delays, ritual is a survival vocabulary. It fills the vacuum left by institutions that promise much and deliver little. In this sense, enchantment is not a refusal of modernity but a commentary on its incompletion.
We often imagine Africa caught between “tradition” and “science”, but that frame is too thin. The real tension is between systems built for human flourishing and systems built for extraction. The factory that hires then fires at whim, the political office that consumes public funds with the appetite of famine, the market that rewards speculation more than labor, these shape belief more powerfully than shrines or incense. You cannot speak credibly of rationality to a population that has been denied the rational benefits of a functioning economy.
Philosophers have long warned that human beings cannot live by technique alone. Tools can extend our reach but cannot answer our fears. Algorithms can classify patterns but cannot soothe the dread of a future that feels increasingly out of one’s grasp. Rationality itself becomes fragile when it is not supported by justice. You cannot ask a country to abandon charms when the civic arena continues to operate through opaque deals, whispered favors, and political theater. Under such conditions, superstition and technology become twins, different faces of the same longing for control.
Professional ethics therefore cannot be reduced to manuals or codes. They must be anchored in a shared social pact. The surgeon must be trained, but she must also have the equipment to save a life. The teacher must uphold standards, but the classroom must not crumble around her. The coach must be accountable, but he must also work within systems that value preparation over spectacle. When society starves its institutions, it cannot be surprised when professionals seek meaning in places beyond the reach of policy.
Yet belief need not be discarded. Properly held, it can ground humility and service. Faith can shape character without undermining competence. The danger emerges only when it becomes a smokescreen for negligence or a narrative that blames invisible forces instead of confronting structural faults. A ritual that blinds is not faith, it is evasion. A ritual that heals dignity is something else entirely.
What the country needs now is not ridicule nor authoritarian dismissal of cultural memory. It needs a renewal of the social contract, one in which institutions earn trust through steady service, citizens demand accountability without cruelty, and leaders understand that legitimacy does not come from charisma or incantation but from the disciplined stewardship of the common good.
We stand in a moment where three forces intersect, a fragile economy, a population negotiating its place in modernity, and a spiritual imagination that refuses to die because the promises of the state have not yet learned to keep themselves. If we do not attend to this intersection, we will mistake symptoms for causes and mockery for enlightenment.
The coach’s confession was not the problem. It was a signal. A small, trembling sign that beneath our public performances lies a profound hunger for competence, for justice, for institutions that do not force citizens to choose between expertise and enchantment.
Between laughter and ritual, a path still exists. A society that tends both the structural and the spiritual, both material justice and moral formation, will not fear the morning’s headlines. It will read them with the composure of a people who know where their responsibilities lie.
Fides et ratio.
