Money at Any Cost — Even Our Children's Future?

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" This question, posed over two thousand years ago, has never felt more urgent than it does in Ghana today.

We have become a people so anxious for money that we will do almost anything to get it — even when the "anything" abhors us.

Recent videos making the rounds show market women openly admitting to practices they themselves find distasteful, all in pursuit of the cedi. Allom — potassium alum, more commonly used for water purification — is added to kokonte (cassava flour) to bleach it from its natural dark colour.

Chemicals are used to force-ripen plantain and banana ahead of their time. These are not isolated incidents; they are a pattern, and the consumers eating these foods carry the health consequences long after the money has changed hands.

We have also seen, in recent years, the disturbing reports linking certain hair relaxer chemicals to serious health complications among Black women. I cannot say with certainty whether every relaxer on our shelves contains these substances, but the pattern is troubling enough to demand scrutiny.

And then, as if food adulteration and harmful cosmetics were not enough, I recently came across something that unsettled me even more: a toffee moulded in the exact shape of a cigarette. Not a sweet with a cigarette-themed wrapper or novelty packaging — a toffee shaped, held, and presented precisely as a cigarette is held. Why design a toffee this way at all, unless the intention is to plant the seed of a smoking habit in a child's mind before that child even understands what smoking is?

This raises an urgent question: how do such products even enter this country? Who clears them at the ports? Who approves their sale? And why do we only discover them through viral videos rather than through the vigilance of the very agencies mandated to protect us?

Just as troubling is our own complicity. I watched a seller confidently defend her stock of these cigarette-shaped toffees after a regulatory team visited her shop, insisting, "it's just plastic." But that is precisely the danger — a child does not see plastic; a child sees an adult, or an older sibling, or a stranger, holding something shaped exactly like a cigarette, mimicking exactly how a cigarette is held and puffed. That image plants itself. It normalises. It teaches, quietly and effectively, long before any real cigarette is ever placed in that child's hand.

Our elders have a saying that says (obi nkyerɛ akwadaa Nyame) — no one needs to point out God to a child, because a child already knows instinctively what is good and pure. But we, the adults, are doing the opposite. We are teaching our children, quite literally, how to hold a cigarette — and calling it business.

Which brings me to the mothers and market women who sell these products, sometimes to the very children in their own households. Do they pause to consider what they are shaping in the minds of the children they sell to — children who may, one day, be their own grandchildren? Is any profit worth that trade?

We must ask ourselves plainly: must we sell anything at all in the name of making money? Shall we spend our lives chasing profit today, only to spend that same money tomorrow on rehabilitation centres for a generation we ourselves helped lead astray?

Let it also be said — and said clearly — that no product like this survives in a marketplace without patronage. If parents were not buying these toffees for their children, sellers would have no reason to stock them. So this is not simply a question for importers and regulators; it is a question for every parent, every guardian, every adult who hands a child money for sweets without a second look at what that sweet is shaped like.

The earlier our regulatory authorities rise — decisively, and not merely with a shop visit and a shrug — to curtail the importation and sale of this product and others like it, the better for our innocent youth and for the generation still to come.

And beyond mere confiscation, there must be stricter sanctions for both the importers who bring such products into the country and the sellers who knowingly keep them on their shelves. A slap on the wrist will not do; a habit of harm demands a cost heavy enough to end it.

The future belongs to the youth, and it is our solemn duty — as parents, as regulators, as a nation — to protect it. Because in the end, what shall it profit us as a country, if we gain the whole market, and lose our children.

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Author: Felix Ekow Eshun

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