mka

[mka @stogia]

@eastsportsman Good they withdrew. But wisdom is not just in withdrawing, it's in never thinking Accra's last green lung was spare land. Gold is precious, oxygen is priceless. Kudos to Parks and Gardens workers and the public who spoke.

[mka @stogia]

Colonialism explains your starting point, it does not explain your trajectory.

The British built a system designed to extract cocoa and produce clerks, not to build an industrial Ghana. That's true. Borders, railways to the port, education for the civil service, all that is the scar.

But 70 years is not 7 years. It's two full generations of leaders, budgets, coups, constitutions, IMF programs and oil discoveries. At some point, you stop being a tenant complaining about the landlord and you become the landlord.

[mka @stogia]

From Panda Mall to Atomic Junction, Accra traffic now has a new lane.
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My windscreen has been polished more than my shoes this month. Same tiny CEOs, same junction, same pitch at my window. At this point I owe them SSNIT.

We joke, but no child dreams of a career at a red light. These kids are not the problem, they are the symptom of a chain that moves children across borders to beg.
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A sweep without shelter just moves the junction. This is not hustle, it's system failure. Fix the chain, protect the child.

[mka @stogia]

The lights were never impossible to fix, we just needed 12 graves to find the switch.

The real darkness was never on the Achimota-Ofankor road, it was in a system that normalizes danger until death embarrasses it into action. Every dark spot on our highways is a policy choice we live with.

We don't have a resource problem, we have a prevention problem. We treat funerals as maintenance reminders.

We have now brought light to that stretch, but we lit it with their absence. 12 lights that will never shine again paid the price for what foresight should have covered.

[mka @stogia]

If you want to learn patience, don't go to a monastery. Come and wait for trotro at Circle when it's about to rain.

The mate will shout "one more" for 25 minutes, the driver is buying boiled egg, and somehow everybody is still laughing and pressing phone. That is Ghana. We don't rush life, we gist with it.

We have all become professors of economics without going to school. We plan our money like IMF, we spend it like we just won lotto, we add small prayer, and somehow the month still ends. God is our accountant and He never fails audit.

Luxury has changed too. The real soft life in Accra now is not Range Rover. It's sleeping for 8 hours straight and ECG did not do cameo appearance. It's buying fuel without checking your bank app twice. It's light staying on during your favorite series.

So my small wisdom for this week: Stop stressing too much.

In Ghana, the sun will be hot whether you are angry or calm. So you might as well be calm and jovial.

[mka @stogia]

@OtiAdjei Hon. Minister, EPL doesn't need a press conference to be relevant, GPL does. That's the gap. But you're right to dream big. With GHS1m per club and 3 live games a week, you've given us a reason to look home. Now let's give us a reason to stay.

[mka @stogia]

Prof. James Atta Peprah has spoken as a teacher, not a politician, and we should listen with humility.

Let us educate ourselves: There is a difference between saying "GoldBod did not steal $1.7bn cash" and saying "$1.7bn is not a consequential loss." The first can be true. The second is economic illiteracy.

The IMF itself tells us where the loss came from - service and assay fees paid to GoldBod, discounts on gold sold to off-takers, and exchange rate losses from buying gold at the forex bureau rate and accounting at the BoG reference rate.

That exchange rate gap is not "paper". When you pay a miner in real dollars at 15 cedis and you book it at 12 cedis, the 3 cedis difference is paid by the Bank of Ghana's equity. That is why the IMF says even if it is partly valuation, it still weakens the BoG balance sheet.

$1.7 billion is 1.5% of our GDP. It is 17% of the value of the doré gold sold. BoG negative equity is now 6.7% of GDP. How is that not consequential?

Some are confusing agency with consequence. Yes, GoldBod was an agent buying on behalf of BoG, and GoldBod itself made a surplus. But if I send my son to buy gold and he buys at a loss on my behalf, the family still lost money. Saying "my son didn't lose, I lost" does not make the family richer.

Prof. Peprah is right. A quasi-fiscal loss is still a loss to the Republic. Calling GH¢22bn an "accounting discrepancy" is like a farmer who sells his cocoa at a loss and tells his wife it is just accounting. The children will still go hungry.

Wisdom is humble enough to call a loss a loss, so we can fix it.

[mka @stogia]

GH¢22bn is too big to explain with insults. If GoldBod says GH¢5.44bn surplus and BoG has a quasi-fiscal loss of $214m on the same gold, then show us one reconciliation sheet - purchase price, off-taker fees, forex rate you sold the dollars at. Gold doesn't lie, accounting does makeup.

[mka @stogia]

This route is the perfect example of why Economics 101 should be taught at Kotoka boarding gate.

You are not paying for distance. You are paying for how expensive it is to be small.
Why JHB - CPT can be $75 for 1,400km and KSI - ACC is $250 for 240km:
1. JHB-CPT is a flying trotro station. That route is 1,255km with 6 airlines flying nonstop - Airlink, CemAir, FlexFlight, FlySafair, LIFT and SAA. They do 50+ flights a day with 180-seat B737s. When you have that many seats, you fight for passengers with price. $66 one-way on FlySafair is normal there.

Kumasi-Accra is 2 airlines sharing 70-seat ATRs. Flights always full? Perfect. That means they have zero incentive to drop price. It's a polite duopoly hug.

2. Short flights are expensive everywhere per km. 80% of the cost is takeoff, landing, handling, and airport charges. Whether you fly 240km or 1,400km, you still pay the same takeoff tax. So per km, Kumasi looks like a scam.

3. Our cost base is in dollars, revenue is in cedis. Plane lease in dollars, spare parts in dollars, insurance in dollars, aviation fuel so expensive AWA literally fuels in Nigeria. Then you sell tickets in cedis that has done 245% devaluation gymnastics. A ticket that was GH¢455 in Jan 2022 is now averaging GH¢1,570 in 2025. A return Accra-Kumasi can now exceed 3,000 cedis.

4. Taxes on taxes. We abolished VAT, brought it back, and just added a new Airport Levy - GH¢100 on every domestic flight since April 1 this year. That's before you even buy fuel.

Low competition is not the cause, it's the symptom. High cost kills competition before it can even start.

[mka @stogia]

When the law is used for what it was made for, even the guilty will respect the process. When it's used for another purpose, even the innocent will start checking their BP.
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Montesquieu warned 300 years ago: there is no worse tyranny than tyranny wearing a lawyer's wig.

So for ORAL the real scorecard is not "who is next?" but "will the EVIDENCE do the talking so politics can keep quiet?" Law is not shito - you don't sprinkle it on your opponent to make it pepper them.

[mka @stogia]

If you abandon the plan because it was wrong, you can't fire the man who told you it was wrong.
That only proves he was right about the culture too.

Lamour said staff were "deceived" and called it "the project of one person". FIFA then dropped the $20bn plan to sell up to 20% of the World Cup business, and then dropped him.

The World Cup is not a private equity asset. It's a trust held for 211 federations and billions of fans. You don't protect it by selling it, and you don't protect FIFA by punishing those who defend it.

[mka @stogia]

@KojoForex Ready

[mka @stogia]

The Archbishop said it right. We were praying for prosperity while our blessings were leaving through the backdoor. When trading partners record 229 tonnes more than we record ourselves, that's not a statistical error, that's a stewardship failure. GoldBod is not just policy, it's correction.
Gold doesn't make a nation rich, systems that keep the gold in the nation do.

[mka @stogia]

May he rest well. Irrespective of hero or villain, what happened to Jason Arday should sober us. Academic offences are usually dealt with inside the academy. This became wall-to-wall national coverage after he resigned amid a probe into parts of his PhD thesis.
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For those who have never been the only Black in a white-dominated room: your accent is a problem, your passport is a problem, your excellence is read as "did you really do this?" That pressure is invisible until you've lived it.

This didn't start as a concern for standards. It started with the claim that he couldn't be that good because Black people like him shouldn't be in those rooms. We can believe in standards AND ask if the bastardisation was out of proportion. That's the wisdom.

[mka @stogia]

You have captured the real problem. When millions in public funds are at stake, time is not neutral. Every needless adjournment becomes a second theft from the public. Daily sittings, even during vacations, and a bar on using disputed funds to finance frivolous applications is not an attack on fair trial, it is the protection of it. If presidential election petitions can be time-bound, so can theft of public funds. We cannot allow the public purse to be both the victim and the financier of its own robbery. End the circus indeed.

[mka @stogia]

@JoyNewsOnTV 4,000 excavators at Tema Port. 3,000+ owners have vanished.
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So galamsey was never about "unemployed youth with shovels"?

No jobless youth imports a $100k excavator.
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This is industrial-scale destruction funded by big men. Publish the names of the importers.

[mka @stogia]

@JoyNewsOnTV With respect Dr. Ayine, history will not remember how many cases an AG FILED.
It will remember how much loot was RECOVERED and how many convictions were SECURED.
Filing 5 is activity. Recovery is achievement. Finish the job and Ghanaians will clap for you.

[mka @stogia]

Probing the aboboyaa link is necessary, but let's not make it the scapegoat. Eyewitnesses say the aboboyaa rider was the FIRST hit-and-run victim. The real probe should be: Why are tricycles, tippers & 100km/h traffic sharing an unlit highway with no signs? 12 lives = regulatory failure.

[mka @stogia]

Indulging in life’s quiet luxuries today…
Soft golden light, the gentle clink of crystal, the rich aroma of something exquisite unfolding. Sometimes the most sumptuous moments aren’t loud or extravagant — they’re the ones where everything simply feels abundant, refined, and deeply satisfying. Savoring the richness. Living a little softer. Feeling a little fuller. What’s your idea of pure, unapologetic indulgence right now?