“We who wear thoughts of others like a suit and tie/ Part-time citizens, daytime criminals”, the biting socio-political and religious commentary commences.

The voice is sage-like, firm and critical, holding light to the darkness of a country sinking in a quagmire of hypocrisy, deception and callousness.

By turning the Beatitudes, a beloved Christian passage based on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, on its head, the poet transposes the sermon into the Ghanaian context. And what better way to speak to a country where over seventy percent identify as Christian and over ninety percent identify as religious? But the joke writes itself: How then do the fruits of these faiths we profess — honesty, integrity, love, kindness, empathy — allude us.

The poem is scathing and spares no one in its way, from the higher ups — the political class  — to the masses and the clergy who, in the stead of being the conscience of the nation, have become co-opted into the theater of political gimmicks. We’re all to be involved in building our motherland, yet we have all, sadly, been  involved in ruining her.

The servants-of-God-cum-servants-of-greed, befittingly christened “pastor-prenuers” dolling out “profit-cies”, have poisoned us with fear and sedated us against rallying together to ignite the change we so badly need. 

Their earthly overlords cannot miss the shots aimed at them: “blessed be our politicians; blessed be their sacred tongues. Blessed be their holy lies; blessed be their priceless vows.” The persona hoots at the political class for carrying on like bandits allergic to integrity and commitment to the people they’ve been contracted to serve.

In all this, the masses cannot count themselves blameless, knowingly and unknowingly offering ourselves as accomplices in their charade.

This poem is not a witch-hunt to find certain offenders to wag fingers at. It ultimately reveals our own complicity, tugging at our personal and collective consciences and calls us to change. For the better.

Written by,

Anthony Morrison Kwavah