Criminals in Suits and The Silence of the Educated
Letter from A Country That Might Not Survive: The Criminals in Suits and The Silence of the Educated
To the ones they tried to fool with flags and degrees,
We’ve spent decades pointing at the man with a gun in the forest.
The rebel with no ideology. The boy who hijacks trucks on a dusty highway.
But I’ve lived long enough to know, that’s not the real enemy.
The real enemy sits in boardrooms and conference halls.
The real criminal wears a suit, speaks fluent English, and calls his theft policy reform.
You see them on TV.
They smile as they announce the privatization of water, electricity, and state owned institutions.
They celebrate budget cuts to public schools in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”
They sign mineral rights away for fifty years, then fly to Geneva for a climate conference.
They don’t carry AK-47s.
They carry pens.
And the blood doesn’t spill fast. It spills slow across generations.
They Kill Us With Policy
They called it SAP; Structural Adjustment Program; back in the 1980s. But it was structural destruction.
Cut education.
Cut healthcare.
Deregulate everything.
And wait for the "foreign investor" to "save you."
Millions fell into hunger and debt. But the consultants got paid. The finance ministers got promotions. The donors wrote glowing reports.
This is the new war. And the battlefield is your economy.
This is the part that hurts the most.
The ones who know better, they’re either silent, or they’ve joined the feeding table.
I see you.
Economists defending austerity in countries with 60% youth unemployment. Lawyers who draft land-grab deals for mining companies. Academics publishing foreign-funded “research” while the country burns.
You hide behind your degrees like they can wash your hands. But let me remind you, Eichmann had paperwork too. He followed the rules. And he made genocide efficient.
So, let me ask the educated African:
What’s your price?
How much did it cost to make you comfortable while your people suffer?
And some haven’t just gone silent.
They’ve entered the system, not to reform it, but to protect it.
Some of them are sitting in Parliament. Some are former professors now serving as presidential advisors. Some once spoke like radicals on campus, but today, draft policies that bleed the same poor they used to organize with. The neutrals are now justifying when they got the opportunity. How interesting?
They wear kente in the morning and sell the country by noon.
This Betrayal Is Continental
It’s not just Ghana.
In Kenya, professors helped shape IMF-backed budget cuts that slashed school funding.
In Nigeria, senior academics defend subsidy removals while advising banks that profit from the chaos.
In South Africa, university intellectuals draft mining laws that destroy indigenous land.
Across this continent, the classroom has become the backdoor to the cabinet. And once they enter, they never speak the truth again.
What Would Nkrumah Say?
Kwame Nkrumah didn’t die in office because he was perfect. He died in exile because he refused to sell his country’s soul.
Today, they sell it every budget cycle.
Our heroes were overthrown, assassinated, erased, not because they failed, but because they told the truth too early.
Now we live in an age of cowards with titles.
What the People know?
My mother used to say, “If the man who robbed us speaks English, they’ll call it policy. But we still go to bed hungry.”
A market woman in Kpone once told me:
“We vote for degrees now. But rice doesn’t know degrees. Rent doesn’t care about your school.”
The people know. They’ve always known. They are watching the betrayal in silence, and silence doesn’t mean they’re weak. It means they’re waiting.
A Letter to My Future Son
Son,
If one day you find these letters buried in an archive, I want you to know something.
Your father wasn’t quiet. Even when it was dangerous. Even when it cost him friends. Even when it felt like shouting into a storm.
There were days I wanted to give up, too. Days I wondered if it was all worth it, writing, speaking, warning - while those in power laughed behind gated walls. But I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t be one of them. I needed you to know that your father chose truth, even when it was lonely.
I want you to know the world didn’t fall apart overnight. It was sabotaged from inside by well-dressed men with foreign bank accounts and no loyalty to the soil beneath their feet.
And the worst part?
They were praised.
They walked red carpets.
They won governance awards.
They shook hands with donors.
But I hope you learn to measure greatness differently.
Not by who built the tallest office……
But by who refused to be silent when silence meant betrayal.
I’ve rewritten this paragraph three times. It still feels hollow. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how to end a letter to a continent that keeps betraying itself.
But I’ll try.
The next war won’t need soldiers.
It will need cowards in suits, lawyers with no loyalty,
and citizens too tired to ask questions.
And while we chase shadows in the streets, the men in suits will be signing away what’s left of the country.
Silence is a choice. And it’s the most dangerous one.
Choose your side.
And if we keep pretending the man with the gun is the greatest threat, we will never see the men with titles who’ve already stolen the future.
In 2023, Ghana’s government borrowed money to pay salaries while granting tax breaks to gold mining companies.
If that’s not treason, what is?
The war has already begun. The battlefield is your silence. Choose your side.
Written in grief, in rage, in truth.
Political Analyst | Researcher | Witness to a Continent That Kills Its Own Conscience.
My own commentary: the Secret Societies that were planted, since the Europeans arrived on our shores, has to be dismantled before any meaningful progress returns on our lands.