EGO REACH EVERYONE

This evening in Winneba, residents turned on their taps only to see brown water trickling out not clear, not refreshing, but tainted and unsafe. Not crystal clear, not refreshing, but dark, stained, and unfit for use. You hesitate, but you try to boil it anyway, hoping that heat will make it safe. Yet the more you look, the more you realise this is water that carries danger, not life. What should give comfort now brings fear.

This is no distant problem. It is here. It is now. It is us. If you choose to stay quiet, then you choose to die.

For years, we have heard the word galamsey. We’ve seen the headlines, the debates, the political finger-pointing. Some shout, some stay quiet, and others treat it as though it’s not their concern. But water does not know political colours. Poisoned rivers don’t ask which party you support before they flow into your cup. Whether you are rich or poor, urban or rural, young or old, when water is gone, when it turns brown and bitter, it will reach us all. Ego reach everyone.

Our ancestors gave us rivers that sparkled under the sun, forests that whispered life, and land that fed us. Today, we stand at the edge of betraying them; and betraying the children yet to come. What stories will we tell them when the taps run dry? That we kept quiet? That we were too divided? That we allowed greed and short-term gain to destroy the very source of life?

This fight is not about politics. It is about survival. It is about dignity. It is about justice for communities whose only crime was to be born along rivers now choked with mercury and silt. It is about mothers who carry buckets of brown water, praying it does not harm their children. It is about farmers watching helplessly as poisoned streams kill their crops and livestock.

But above all, it is about us, all of us. The time for silence is gone. The time for excuses has passed. This is the time to rise together, to say with one voice: Stop galamsey. Protect our water. Save our future.

Because when the rivers run dry, when the taps turn brown, when the land no longer yields, no politician, no company, no individual will be spared. Ego reach everyone.

So let us not wait for desperation. Let us not wait until it is too late. Let us join our voices, our hands, our courage, and act now. For if we do not, history will remember us as the generation that saw the water turn brown and chose silence.

But if we rise, if we speak, if we fight for our rivers, then history will also remember us, as the generation that saved Ghana’s soul.