In the corridors of our churches and the public squares of our cities, a peculiar drama unfolds. Women—often educated, ambitious, and otherwise unafraid of the world—are told their deepest struggle is not in nation-building, career, or self-discovery, but in locating a ring and a man’s surname. They kneel at all-night vigils, clutching bottles of anointed oil, told to wrestle with unseen “spiritual husbands” that prowl in dreams, binding them from earthly marriage. Pastors prescribe fasts, seed offerings, and endless prayer lines as an antidote, as though the only obstacle to a woman’s fullness is an ethereal rival in her sleep. One wonders: if the nation’s debt crisis were as aggressively exorcised as these phantom grooms, perhaps the cedi might have been saved by now.
Meanwhile, a different spectacle thrives in the digital bazaar. On glowing screens, women are displayed like finely packaged commodities—fair-skinned, filtered, finely dressed—auctioned in a global marketplace where desirability is a stock to be traded. The influencers and media personalities chant the new catechism: value is curves, complexion, and the ability to be claimed. Between the pulpit and the algorithm, marriage is no longer a covenant; it is currency, complete with fluctuating exchange rates. The divine husband competes with the sugar daddy, while the algorithm quietly counts the clicks.
This is not merely a private anguish—it is a booming industry. Prophets sell miracle rings with the gusto of pyramid-scheme salesmen. Cosmetic clinics promise to sculpt destiny through silicone. Stylists and matchmakers advertise their services as if they were IMF negotiators, rebranding loneliness as fiscal failure. Even “Christian dating apps” emerge, piously dressed in scripture while running on the same dopamine-fueled swipes as Tinder. A society that should be tackling unemployment, corruption, and environmental collapse instead funnels its anxieties through the womb and the ring finger of its women. And all the while, politicians smile, grateful that citizens, distracted by wedding gowns and waist trainers, are too busy to notice the stolen funds and failed infrastructure.
Yet the deeper question lingers: what kind of nation entrusts its hopes to prayers against invisible suitors while ignoring the visible crisis of justice, housing, or health? What future is secured when women are trained to battle phantoms at night and polish their curated images by day, all for the lottery of one man’s approval? A PhD in astrophysics becomes, in this system, merely “still single at thirty.” An entrepreneur’s start-up is judged not by market traction, but by her “marriageability.” Education and innovation shrink beneath the towering shadow of “have you found someone yet?”
The cruelty is subtle but sharp. Women are told they are free, but their worth remains trapped between the altar and the algorithm. They are told to chase independence but punished for attaining it, for independence is admirable only until it threatens the fragile ego of the would-be groom. They are paraded as trophies for male ambition, yet blamed when marriages collapse, for the marketplace never refunds damaged goods.
And so the spectacle continues—Sunday vigils against dream-husbands, weekday shopping for contour palettes, weekend brunches scrolling through curated couples on Instagram. A theater where everyone plays their part: the pastor, the prophetess, the influencer, the stylist, the cosmetic surgeon, the politician—all feeding off the anxiety of women taught to believe that life without a man’s surname is a kind of national disgrace.
But perhaps the joke is on the nation itself. For a people that trains its daughters to chase phantoms and polish their desirability rather than their intellect is not just selling women short; it is bankrupting its future. In this marketplace of matrimony, everyone is buying, everyone is selling, and no one stops to ask what, in truth, is being lost.
— Richard Dablah
Email: _richard.dablah@gmail.com