By Richard DABLAH
(richard.dablah@gmail.com)
I stood before the mirror and did not see myself. I saw a voice: the part that reads balance sheets at midnight, drafts laws nobody passes, and grows tired of headlines that change nothing. It looked at me and said, plain and cold: “You wanted the invoice changed. They gave you theatre.”
That sentence is the whole story. Ministers thundered. A regulator threatened licence suspension. A multinational reshuffled its menus and called it generosity. The result? Subscribers pay the same monthly sum. They get more channels. They do not get a lighter bill.
This is not a quarrel about taste. It is about arithmetic. For a teacher in Kumasi, for a market trader in Accra, for a student sharing a single lightbulb, what matters is how much the monthly outflow eats into the week’s money. Channels are icing. The invoice is the cake.
We were told the showdown was about fairness. The demand was a concrete one: a meaningful price cut. What arrived was a marketing manoeuvre — package upgrades and cheaper decoders for new customers. Good copy for a press conference. Bad policy for a household that needs fewer cedis off its ledger.
There are reasons the government’s rhetoric met corporate patience. Content rights are priced in foreign currency. Satellite leases, transnational contracts, and regional remittances make costs volatile. Those are real constraints. Recognising them is not surrender. It is the starting point for sensible policy, not the alibi for opacity.
So what should the state do when the balance sheet creaks? Not theatrics. Not ultimatums that leave the rulebook unchanged. Real power moves off-camera: slow, technical, stubborn. If you want to change what people pay, change the incentives and the rules.
Start with transparency. If a company insists costs justify a price, publish the numbers that apply to the Ghana market — local revenues, local costs, margins that matter to Ghanaian subscribers. Group accounts are camouflage. Market-level filings, verified and public, are civic medicine. Numbers either survive scrutiny or they do not. Let the debate be about facts, not slogans.
Second, give targeted relief, not universal marketing stunts. A short, means-tested voucher for the poorest households would be cheaper and fairer than handing everyone an extra bouquet. It puts cash where it matters and buys the state time to build durable fixes.
Third, change licensing practice: condition license renewals and spectrum allocations on affordability commitments and local-investment obligations. Make licenses instruments of public interest, not merely permissions for profit. If a market exhibits dominant behavior, utilize competition tools: lower barriers for alternatives, support local platforms with content carve-outs, and make it easier for OTT services to operate.
Fourth, build teeth into the regulator. An audit function with real powers to demand market-level data, investigate cross-subsidies, and sanction opaque practices will shift bargaining from the studio to the statute. Ministers can trade headlines; institutions with authority change incentives.
None of this is glamorous. It will not trend. It will not produce a single triumphant soundbite. But it will change the arithmetic. A cedi saved each month compounds into school fees, into fewer loans, into less hunger. Channels never did that.
If the recent deal can be called anything, call it a rehearsal. All parties kept the stage: politicians got optics, the company preserved margins, and the regulator kept ambiguity to preserve its independence on paper while losing ground in practice. The audience? Left holding the bill.
We have a choice. Spend political capital on the next loud ultimatum that ends in repackaging. Or spend it drafting rules that make invoices honest. Spend it on targeted social support that reaches the poorest. Spend it on a regulator that can bite.
I do not want applause. I want laws that work. I want verified ledgers, a voucher that reaches the vulnerable, licences tied to affordability, and a regulator that stops being a prop. That is the work that will actually change lives — not the next televised confrontation, not the next package upgrade, but the steady, institutional work that turns theatre into accountability.
Leges, non ludi.
