By Richard DABLAH
Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com
This morning, I revisited the Sermon on the Mount, not as piety or private counsel but as an unexpectedly clinical guide to how human beings respond to threat. Once separated from its devotional frame, Matthew 5 to 7 reads like a manual posing a corrosive political question: what happens when a polity treats retaliation as public policy and identity as a score to be settled? Its prescriptions, such as turning the other cheek, loving one’s enemies, and refusing the logic of equivalence, appear at first to be moral acrobatics. A deeper reading reveals something else. What if the refusal to retaliate is the only reliable mechanism for halting cycles of escalation that slowly dissolve institutions from within?
From this reflection, my mind shifted to a historical template: Saul, Israel’s first king. His story is not primarily a drama of power gained and lost, but an anatomy of threat miscalibration. Saul did not collapse because he lacked the instruments of statecraft. He collapsed because every nuisance appeared existential. David was not simply a competitor. He functioned as a mirror that exposed Saul’s most intimate insecurity. Leaders of the Saul variety do not merely confront opponents. They project onto them the weaknesses they fear in themselves. Once that projection becomes policy, governance loses its institutional rationality and the public interest becomes expendable.
This is no literary flourish. One only needs to examine the institutional terrain of Ghana today: the Presidency; Parliament; the Attorney-General and Ministry of Justice; the Office of the Special Prosecutor; the police and security services; the judiciary; and a media and civil-society sector that is increasingly combative. When such institutions begin operating with a single underlying assumption that criticism is conspiracy and dissent is sabotage, the state stops acting as a neutral arbiter. It morphs into a machinery for settling scores. This dynamic is visible in a series of recent episodes, including high-visibility asset-recovery operations, the heavily publicised docket of the OSP, the shock of ghost names on payrolls, investigative journalism followed by prosecutorial demonstrations of force, and routine complaints of heavy-handed protest policing. Each event, considered alone, may be defensible as enforcement or accountability. Together they form a feedback loop that rewards spectacle rather than justice.
Consider the Operation Recover All Loot initiative. Announced with public enthusiasm, the ORAL report and its subsequent prosecutorial momentum created the image of decisive recovery of national resources. Yet such visibility also produces a political imperative to deliver rapid results. Rapid results favour symbolic victories and conspicuous punishment rather than the slow, disciplined work of institutional reform. Anti-corruption activity becomes a political currency that can be spent selectively. The Office of the Special Prosecutor occupies a similarly ambiguous position. Its public investigations, including the Cecilia Dapaah matter, demonstrate a willingness to pursue significant cases. Yet the very visibility of its docket turns law enforcement into narrative management and exposes the institution to accusations of selective application.
The ghost-names scandal illustrates how administrative decay becomes political ammunition. The discovery of tens of thousands of suspected fictitious payroll entries at the National Service Authority generated immediate public outrage and a swift presidential directive. Outrage demands resolution, and often demands it quickly. Quick resolutions are rarely complete. They create fertile space for prosecutors and political actors who prefer headlines to the painstaking repair of systems. The sequence linking the Fourth Estate’s investigation to official charges reflects a familiar pattern: journalists expose misuse; institutions react; reactions are interpreted through partisan filters; the outcome becomes either a celebration of cleansing or an accusation of cleansing for partisan purposes. Neither scenario produces enduring trust.
From these patterns emerges a psychological portrait of the Saul-type leader that is analytical rather than moralistic. This leader magnifies threat, merges personal identity with the authority of office, and substitutes instinct for reflection. Decision-making becomes reactive. Problems are personalised and opponents are transformed into scapegoats. Institutions are prevented from exercising independence and are converted into instruments. Media and civil society no longer function as interlocutors and are instead reclassified as adversaries. Cognitive distortions such as projection, confirmation bias, zero-sum reasoning, and moral grandiosity do not merely influence judgment. They harden into modes of governance. The consequences follow predictably. The rule of law erodes because prosecutions acquire a political scent. Security forces become politicised and lose legitimacy. The media environment fractures. Long-term policy becomes impossible under the heat of score-settling. Public service morale collapses as competence yields to allegiance.
This diagnosis also implies a path to remedy. If the Saul tendency is a psychological pathology, institutions must serve as the national immune system. The task is not simply to expose Saul-like tendencies when they surface. Electorates often reward performative toughness. The task is to make the political cost of weaponising the state exceed the short-term rewards. This requires clear and depersonalised rules governing investigations, financial and legal insulation for oversight bodies so that their caseloads do not become partisan lists, professional policing supported by independent review mechanisms, routine audits of payrolls and procurement that reduce the space for theatrical prosecutions, and a civic culture that treats dissent as democratic input rather than an existential threat. These steps are procedural rather than pious.
If we read Matthew not as a sermon but as a political manual, the underlying imperative becomes unambiguously pragmatic. The nation must stop allowing fear of adversaries to dictate its tempo. Turning the other cheek is not capitulation. It is the refusal to let opponents set the pace of political life. Loving one’s enemies is not sentimental. It diminishes the emotional charge that powers cycles of escalation. Praying for one’s persecutors, in secular terms, means detaching identity from the conflict so that the conflict cannot determine identity.
The most seductive illusion in democratic life is the belief that retaliatory speed is a measure of governing strength. Saul-like leaders appear strong because they act quickly to neutralise threats. In fact, they reveal their fragility. A polity that allows such fragility to calcify into institutional reflex will spend its energy prosecuting scandals rather than governing for the long term.
For Ghana, or any democracy, to avoid such a fate, two tasks must proceed together. Institutions must be fortified so that retaliation becomes costly, and the civic psyche must be cultivated so that restraint becomes politically acceptable. Without both, nations will continue to elect leaders who excel in performance while weakening the state beneath their feet. The adversary most in need of defeat is not a rival party or a corrupt minister. It is the Saul within, the projection, the panic, and the reflex that, once empowered, converts governance into theatre and the public good into a casualty.
*Res publica fragile est; prudentia sola servat.*
_The republic is fragile; only prudence preserves it._