Every day we walk travelers through the Cape Coast and Elmina Slave Dungeons - places where history is not read in books but inhaled in the suffocating air, touched in the cold stone walls, and felt in the silence between chains. Whether through flagship banners like “The Year of Return”, “December in Ghana”, or Emancipation Festivals. Travelers arrive curious, they leave shaken. Some whisper prayers, others wipe silent tears. The air is heavy with history - we tell them of greed and betrayal, of kingdoms that sold their own, of raids, and of the unfathomable cruelty of man against man.
Yet, one question always lingers, louder than the echoes of those dungeons…
Do our leaders - especially the political class - ever go there to reflect? Do we step into those dungeons with our conscience - I mean the right conscience, turned on? Do we pause in our private times to turn the pages of books like ‘Homegoing’ by Yaa Gyasi, which lay bare the difficult narratives of the slave trade and its legacy? Do we come out transformed, vowing “Never Again”?
Because if we do, then “Never Again” would not stop at the slave trade. It would echo fiercer: “Never Again to Corruption”, never again to greed!
Let’s be honest. We denounce the slave masters for centuries of exploitation, but what about us today? We loot state resources with the same greed that once fueled the transatlantic trade. The only difference? The chains are invisible, but just as crippling and deadly.
Ghost names draw NSS salaries. A judicial official will dip hands into public coffers for family luxuries and feign ignorance of the very law she swore to uphold! Loans meant for roads disappear into individual pockets while potholes claim lives - maybe more than the slave trade did. And in villages like Tafi-Dekpor, families still drink from streams shared with sheep. Women and Children walk kilometers just to access antenatal care or attend school. The nearest hospital is about a two-hour journey on a bumpy road. We can't call this failure – it’s modern slavery, written in corruption, and paid for with human lives.
Fair to say we are naked right in a garment factory, hungry while the barns are full, thirsty in the rain. We sit on thrones of gold, yet beg at our own gates of plenty, and still pretend to wonder why “everything comes to naught.”
Now tell me, are we any different from the slave traders we condemn? Today, we cloak corruption in big titles, in polished English, in political slogans, while millions are enslaved by poverty, bad healthcare, and hopelessness.
According to the Ghana Statistical Service and Transparency International, corruption siphons billions from Ghana’s economy each year. That’s enough to build hospitals, schools, mechanized boreholes, and decent roads across the country. Instead, it builds mansions for a few and graves for the many.
So I ask again: Have we learned? Really learned? Because if after standing in those dungeons our leaders walk out still greedy, still scheming, still blind to the suffering of their own people, then the lesson of history has been wasted.
The greatest betrayal is not what the slave masters did centuries ago. It is what we, with all the benefit of history, are still doing to ourselves today.
Slavery shouted: Never Again! Corruption whispers: Again and again and again. And until we rise to say with one voice, “Never Again to corruption,” never again to greed, we are not free.
Indeed we can do better!
