Here’s the thing about microphones: Stick one in front of a fool, and he just gets louder.

Unfortunately, you can’t really blame him, can you? Fools are foolish, just like lungs are for breathing and fire burns. Trying to change an idiot is like lecturing rocks for being too hard. They don’t care and can’t change anyway.

So when the National Peace Council of Ghana admonished MP Kennedy Agyepong for making some very nasty threats surrounding next year’s elections, they kind of missed the mark, like berating pus and ignoring bacteria. What they should’ve done is upbraid the news media.

Agyepong is a member of parliament for the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Like a lot of his crew, he really wants the NPP to win next year’s elections and unseat the ruling New Democratic Congress (NDC). Recently, he told Citi FM that the country would devolve into a Rwanda-like massacre if anybody from the NDC messes around at the polls. Rwanda. He actually said that. You know, like the kind of pre-planned, media-assisted, eyeball-to-eyeball homicide that kills about a million people in 100 days and forever damages a nation’s psyche.

Agyepong was answering to Koku Anyidoho, the NDC director of communications for presidency. Anyidoho recently bellied up to a microphone at a radio station in the U.K. to taunt and provoke NPP leader Nana Akufo-Addo and his supporters. This, he said, was in response to Akufo-Addo’s own slogan of “All die be die,” which, in pigeon English, basically means go fight for victory and who cares if you die. People from the NPP camp insist it was President John Atta Mills who set the whole thing off by comparing the coming campaigns to Kenya’s election crisis of 2007-08.

Ghana is a relatively stable place, but, during the 2008 election campaign, there was deadly political violence in the north. Now, with the country’s sixth election fast approaching, civil society is ringing the alarm about the increasingly volatile nature of political discourse.

So far, you don’t hear too much about the media’s role in all this. Agyepong and Anyidoho were quoted many times, verbatim, as are all politicians in this country when they work themselves into indignant lathers. First pronounced on the radio, their words were sucked into an echo-chamber and bounced all over the country. Newspaper reporters fall over themselves to publish – or, if you like, recycle – these kinds of comments. Aggregating websites group together those same stories. Morning radio panels broadcast the day’s newspaper headlines.

The whole thing is really quite dangerous. Think about it: Now, out there in the national imagination, is the suggestion that next year’s elections have bitter ethnic dimensions, that maybe cutting someone’s head off with a machete is acceptable and likely behavior, that certain political camps are ready to be actively violent in defence of what they deem as opposition transgressions.

In a country where literacy is low, poverty is high, and democracy is young, a lot of people get really swept up in this stuff. Look at the power of Radio Télévision Libre Mille-Collines in Rwanda, the role of vernacular radio stations in Kenya, and the state broadcaster in Côte D’Ivoire. Now think about propaganda in Nazi Germany. People, unfortunately, are putty, malleable little tragedies waiting to be marched off whatever cliff happens to be highest.

Media need to realize this a pre-election phase in the country. They need to think hard about the guests they invite on broadcast shows, about the quotes they run in newspapers, and the depth they give political coverage in general.

Right now, it’s kind of a mess.

Rush hour in Accra: It’s where meticulous, Ghanaian refinement goes to die. You see adults, grown men and women in formal wear, hurl themselves at moving vehicles, faces all squished up with competitive strain, and it’s just a shameless melee of flying elbows and civil degradation. A few days ago, I saw a little old lady nearly trampled as she tried to climb onto one of the battered public transit vans called tro-tros.

The whole thing is a sort of contradiction in motion. Most Ghanaians are very polite and proper. They don’t project the type of image you’d associate with shoving children into puddles to secure a swift ride to work. More than that, Ghana makes a very big show of respecting its elders. If you want to run afoul of popular decency, you don’t have to trample an old lady in the backseat of a tro-tro. Just address her by her fist name. It won’t go over well.

But the deal breaks there. Growing old can be tough anywhere. In the West, you might find yourself quarantined in some clinical facility, drooling at soap opera reruns, a tray of untouched pees in your lap, and one son who works in middle management and hasn’t visited in four years. Family dynamics in Africa don’t typically permit that sort of thing. The extended family is huge, and members generally don’t migrate too far from one another. There’s a support system for young and old alike, a kind of social capital borne in the blood.

But some researchers say that’s changing, thanks to urbanization, westernization, globalization – all those -isms and -izations that so completely permeate the world. Increasingly, seniors can only rely on themselves.

Meanwhile, there are more senior women than men. The gender break down complicates things even further. Of the 107,000 pensioners in 2010, just 17,229 were women. That’s because most women work in the informal sector. They sell kola nuts in the market. They grill plantains on the side of the road. They hawk fish at the docks.

Maybe they’re like Mariana Sayitou, a 67-year-old bean seller in Old Fadama, one of Accra’s more controversial slums. She makes about CAN $18 a day. That money goes to feeding her and three of her kids, as well as paying school fees and buying textbooks. Her ex-husband, who divorced her after a row between in-laws, lives in the north and doesn’t help with the children at all. She feels lucky, because whenever she gets sick, her 30-year-old son will take her to the hospital. Call that the last vestiges of the African familial support system.

You can ask Mariana if she’s lonely, and she’ll laugh. It isn’t a bitter laugh. It’s a surprised laugh, like maybe no one has asked her that before. Yeah, she’s lonely. But she doesn’t want to marry again. She wants to focus on her children, wants to make sure they’re educated and successful.

That way, they can take care of her when she’s finally too old to work.

A neighbour stopped me on my way to work.

“Hello?” she called out. “Hello?”

It was October 21, one day after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was killed.

“Yesterday was an historic day,” she said, wanting to make sure I was aware. It was hard to tell if she was happy or sad, or still trying to figure it out.

At work, reporters and editors crowded around the flat screen TV in the newsroom. They watched Gaddafi – bloodied, confused, babbling, humiliated – as he stumbled through the crowd, his prominent chin, so square and noble in his usurping youth, now just a sagging, spattered punctuation mark in history.

The reactions were mixed. There was jubilation. There was ambivalence. And there was anger.

“We will wash your revenge in the blood of your enemies,” I heard one reporter mutter under her breath.

Throughout the week, TV news played images of Gaddafi’s naked corpse rotting in a meat locker, his penis pixalated, his skin an odd, dead colour, and all around him Libyans taking pictures with their cell phones, trying to lock up digitally the massive, historical change made metaphor right at their feet.

It’s a jarring sight, diametrically opposed to the images of Gaddafi we typically see. The brother leader, the king of kings, dressed in his military livery, in his traditional garb, wearing aviators, expounding from a podium, always in control. Now naked and dead and surrounded by cell phone cameras. It’s the Hussein-in-a-hole effect, like Mubarak in a cage, like Charles Taylor in a courtroom, like Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague: power denuded, power made vulnerable, so pathetically so that it’s a little bit laughable, if only because it seems so impossible.

“It makes me sad to see him like that,” said an Auntie who runs a South La bar. “It makes me sad.”

A lot of people remember a younger Gaddafi. He overthrew Libya’s monarchy when he was just 27, and in the years since he threw all kinds of ideas into the African imagination, first in the north and then across the Sub-Saharan regions as well. He promised Arab socialism in his Green Book. He wanted a United States of Africa, and his rhetoric was purple with pan-African sentiment. It made some people proud: See Gaddafi at the UN, wending his way through an hour of oratory, demanding trillions in reparations for colonialism.

The reporter who whispered for his bloody revenge called him an African hero. One of my roommates will never forget when Gaddafi’s entourage drove to Ghana from Tripoli, and he gestured wildly recounting the details, the vehicles expensive and impressive, the soldiers well-dressed and disciplined, and in their wake gifts of cars for the government.

But that’s not the narrative told in the West. In the West, where Gaddafi is inextricably associated with terrorist acts like Lockerbie, he was a super villain, the kind of guy who wanted his picture taken with the likes of Idi Amin, Uganda’s post-Independence psychopath, or Bashar al-Assad, who is brutally repressing his own revolution in Syria. Even the uneasy, post-9/11 alliance didn’t really wash in the public. Western news narratives don’t often permit nuance. There are good guys and bad, and not much in between.

Here, even in proud eulogies, there’s at least quiet acknowledgment of Gaddafi’s darker side. Absolute power, people say, it’ll do that: torture, murder, abductions. And sometimes they say nothing at all; it’s just a trick of tonality, a dark cloud floating in their voice, disappointment in denial. You hear it, but you aren’t told.

“It was an historic day,” my neighbour said again, and you figure it’ll take her some time to make sense of all that history.

Most of us, somewhere along the way, have borne witness to the profound frailty of flesh. It could be that you’ve been touched by suicide, or that you’ve watched an elder die, or that violence, with or without design, has crashed and thrashed its way into your life.

In some parts of the world, a phalanx of sanitizers works tirelessly to rid us of such baggage. From smooth roads to American Idol, inconsequential drug abuse to reliable plumbing, there’s a mental and physical aesthetic that, incidentally or not, works well in the slow but sure subversion of most people’s trauma.

In other parts of the world, there is no such aesthetic. It has been smashed by corruption and politics and conflict, and only then if it existed to begin with. In its absence are all the many provocations of death.

There is, for example, a correlation between open sewers and cholera. There is a relationship between haggard roads and the piles of bodies that frequently gather at their sides. An unfinished building is not a far cry from a homeless person, who himself is much akin to an armed robber, who again brings to mind a frenzied, deadly mob of vigilantes. Perhaps most sadly of all, there is a clear and present connection between poverty and dead children.

Which brings us to Korle Bu Teaching Hospital’s emergency children’s ward. It’s a tiny place run by frustrated workers, their gripes wide and ranging, from lack of equipment and overcrowding, to low pay and long hours.

In here, the aesthetic is startling. It’s tiny kids curled up under small blankets, a few to a bed, one of them convulsing, his eyes glazed even as his brow furrows in contraction. It’s cribs that look like the baskets of bicycles. It’s only one incubator.

“Every day, some children die here,” says Professor Bamenla Goka, head of the hospital’s child care department. “Most of the children coming in with medical problems are from the lower socio-economic group, which is understandable because many of the illnesses that we see are related to poverty in one way or the other.”

Those children who do die at Korle Bu, they usually go within the first 24 hours of their stay. Sometimes the first 12. Maybe their parents have not signed up for insurance, and, rather than bear care costs they couldn’t afford, they wasted precious time administering home medicine.

“We all agree that the emergency ward in Korle Bu is quite small, but it has made a name and everyone wants to go there,” says Dr. Afisah Zakariah, head of the Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate of the Ministry of Health.

It’s a tertiary hospital, she continues, which means it’s a referral centre, and patients overburden the place when they skip the primary and secondary institutions. As for salaries, nurses make two or three times that of civil servants. She finds their complaints offensive. She also says Korle Bu has a budget to procure its own equipment, and, besides, a needs assessment of a year ago will deliver new equipment soon.

“The waiting has gone on for too long,” says Goka. “The emergency room is inhumane for the patients who are there, their parents, and for the staff, so we are appealing that the emergency room refurbishment is done by all means.”

Meanwhile, some children die everyday.

“Now we have to focus on an audit of child death, so that we actually see what is going on,” says Zakariah. “If every day we lose a child, then we really need to sit up and see what is going.”

Which brings us back to aesthetics. Healthiness is a holistic state of being. It’s biology interfacing with lifestyle and infrastructure, interfacing with development.

“So paying attention to people’s education, housing, and food availability will all help to keep people healthy,” says Goka.

God is everywhere in Ghana. His proclamations are stenciled on the rear windows of trundling taxis and tro-tros; His grandeur is recalled in the names of chop bars and canteens; self-styled preachers shout His verses in the quiet of rising dawn; every Sunday morning, His people flow through the streets, all wildly coloured dresses and finely tailored suits, off to glory in his name. In a country of big men, God is surely the biggest.

It follows that there is celebrity in his service. There is wealth and adulation. In the physical absence of God, it is the pastor who is exalted.

Promises of such dizzying stature are sure to attract rogues, cheats, and charlatans, and the country has been experiencing a wave of pastor-perpetrated crime, especially against women.

Vaginas are beset by evil spirits, and only a righteous penis can cleanse them. Or righteous fingers. Or, for that matter, tongues. Sometimes, there isn’t any such pretense, and pastors rape both minors and adults. One pastor conned an exorbitant sum from a British national, telling her, quite simply, that she would die if she didn’t hand it over. Another pastor was caught smuggling a young girl from Accra to Ivory Coast.

It goes on. At length.

So now the debate: Does government have legislative responsibility? Should it establish a regulatory environment and deploy a monitoring agency? Or is this something religious institutions should address? Can their own licensing and recognition apparatus snuff out the wave of come-lately churches these pastors call pulpit? It’s a collision of rights: life and religion; association and cruel, degrading treatment.

Some people in the human rights community – like Amnesty International Ghana or the National Council on Women and Development – don’t seem especially interested in the debate. You ask them for opinions, and they offer none. Others, like the outspoken Human Rights Advocacy Centre, are calling for regulations. Religious freedom, they say, is not synonymous with pastoral predation.

But the clergy has not necessarily followed suit. The chairman of the Christian Council of Ghana did so in the media, but he wasn’t joined by the Pentecostal or Charismatic movements. The latter believes existing institutions should be strengthened, and government’s only role should be public support of their licensing and training systems.

Meanwhile, the public itself has to develop more church savvy. One rogue pastor pulled a flock of almost 10,000, a staggering number compared to the 3,000 or so claimed by seemingly more legitimate bodies.

Regional relativity aside, Ghana is a poor country with a lot of desperate people. They want travel visas. They want children and stable marriages. They want jobs and money. They go to church thinking these things can be obtained in the pews, and at the pulpit they find a jewel-encrusted miracle-worker who promises them the same.

Trickery reigns. One Ghanaian said some pastors mic their pews; people pray out-loud, in rushed voices, and their wants are transmitted to the pastor’s ear-bud – call it Divine Knowledge. And then there are the small victories, a smooth talking pastor who reconciles husband and wife, thus ensuring the woman, whose economic potential is vastly devalued, saves not just her marriage, but her house, food, and clothing. Never underestimate the devotion of gratitude.

It’s interesting to note that, at least according to media stories, the law does work. Pastors commit crimes. They are caught, arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed. In many ways, it’s a testament to a police service often criticized for corruption. But these machinations are reactive. They don’t seem to be slowing the production of victims.

So the central question is this: Can the church be trusted do deal with this on its own? Maybe. But that didn’t really work with the Roman Catholics, did it?