When Insult Becomes the Medium: Reading Ghana's Public Speech

Ghana's public insults are not just bad manners. They are a signal of institutional stress — and a state that polices the language without hearing the grievance risks treating the symptom as the disease. The danger, then, is not simply that Ghanaians are insulting one another. It is that society may gradually lose the ability to disagree without destroying the possibility of living together.

Ghana's communication environment is undergoing a significant shift in the character, function and political economy of public speech. What was once isolated abusive language in newspapers, radio phone-ins and political commentary has become an organising mechanism of public engagement.

I call this phenomenon the Insult Medium: a communicative environment in which insult, ridicule, profanity, humiliation and antagonistic speech no longer function merely as content carried by the media. They have become a medium in their own right — one through which political grievances, social identities, institutional distrust and struggles for visibility are negotiated.

The argument builds on my own media-monitoring work, which began in 2005. That July, research by the Centre for Media Analysis (CMA) challenged the tendency to blame the media for negative reportage, arguing that the media reflects the feelings and thinking of society. A 2006 CMA assessment went on to identify 368 insults across 47 newspaper columns in the first two quarters of that year alone. This essay returns to that early observation under radically changed technological conditions.

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Bakhtin, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Jürgen Habermas, James C. Scott, Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi Bhabha, Shoshana Zuboff and Lauren Berlant, I propose five connected concepts: Public-Voice Weaponry (PVW), the Public-Truth Filter (PTF), Public-Expectations Deficiency (PED), Lingual-Desertification and the Digital Coyote.

My argument is that public insults in Ghana should be neither romanticised as democratic resistance nor dismissed as social indiscipline. They form a stratified phenomenon whose political meaning depends on the target, the truth content, the power relationship, the gendered character of the attack and its place in the economy of attention.

Understanding insults is not defending them

One boundary must be set before going further. This essay does not advocate insults. It supports President John Mahama's call at a public forum in the USA , for the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) and civil-society organisations to open a dialogue on the scale of insults in Ghana's public space.

It does not defend personal abuse, defamation, harassment, threats, incitement or speech that creates a genuine national-security risk. Nor does it argue that citizens should be immune from the legal consequences of demonstrably harmful speech simply because that speech grows out of political frustration.

The argument is analytical, not celebratory. Asking why are people insulting? is a question of sociology, political communication and intelligence. Arguing that people should be allowed to insult without consequence is a question of law and public policy. Confusing the two is a serious analytical error.

The central proposition is therefore twofold:

• An insult may be socially significant without being legally legitimate.
• An insult being offensive does not automatically make it a security threat, or establish defamation.

The rest of the framework depends on that distinction.

Three kinds of insult: expression, defamation and threat

Ghana's current debate on insults routinely collapses three different categories: insult as political and social expression, insult as defamation, and insult as a personal or national-security threat. They can overlap in a given case, but they should never be treated as the same thing.

The point of the table is simple: the same word can fall into entirely different categories depending on its context, target, factual content, intent and consequences.

I. The medium is the malice

Tune into a Ghanaian morning radio show, join a political discussion online or scroll through social media, and one feature of the national conversation is hard to miss: the public insult has become a normal mode of engagement.

That deserves more attention than the usual explanation that Ghanaian public discourse has simply become "indisciplined". The insult has been transformed. It is no longer only something communicated through the media. Increasingly, it is communicated as the media.

This is where Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, "the medium is the message", becomes useful. The platforms still matter, but the deeper change lies in the logic of communication itself. Radio, television, Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube and WhatsApp supply the infrastructure; antagonism, ridicule and insult increasingly supply the grammar. The result is the Insult Medium.

The Insult Medium is not the same as profanity, and not every harsh political statement is abuse. It describes an environment in which insult becomes the vehicle for attracting attention, challenging authority, venting frustration, humiliating opponents, mobilising political identities, generating algorithmic engagement, building celebrity, policing gender and forcing neglected grievances into view.

The phenomenon is older than the digital environment. In July 2005, the Centre for Media Analysis, which I then led, publicly challenged the tendency to blame the media for negative reportage, arguing that the media reflects the feelings and thinking of society. That reverses the direction of causality: the media does not simply manufacture social toxicity — it can also reveal it.

The Insult Medium therefore needs a double reading. It is both a producer of social toxicity and a diagnostic instrument for measuring accumulated frustration. The real question is not why are Ghanaians insulting one another? but what social, political, economic and technological conditions make insult an increasingly useful language of public participation?

II. From negative media to the Insult Medium

This argument extends an earlier line of inquiry rather than announcing a new discovery. By 2005, the Centre for Media Analysis was already examining the relationship between negative media content and wider social attitudes. Its July 2005 report, Media Not to Blame, urged society and corporate institutions to stop blaming the media for negative reportage, because the media reflected what society felt and thought.

That was an important epistemological move. It positioned media content as a social mirror. The question was not only whether journalists were responsible for negativity, but what the prevalence of negativity revealed about the society being represented.

The data that followed reinforced the point. In October 2005, CMA research found that 82 percent of public comments in a sampled period were uncomplimentary. In 2006, a CMA study of private media recorded 368 insults across 47 newspaper columns in the first two quarters of the year.

These findings matter because they show that the phenomenon predates TikTok, Facebook and algorithmic culture. The technology has changed; the underlying social impulse has not gone away. What has changed is the velocity, scale, monetisation and visibility of antagonistic speech.

The 2005 question was: what does negative media content reveal about Ghanaian society? Today's question is: what does the normalisation of insult reveal about the psychological, political and institutional condition of Ghanaian society? Part of the answer, I suggest, lies in eroding public expectations, declining institutional trust and a rupture in communicative restraint.

III. From obuo to talking back

Ghanaian public communication has long placed great cultural value on obuo: respect, deference and appropriate speech toward elders and people in authority. That order has real social value. It preserves cohesion, regulates relationships between generations and discourages needless humiliation.

But it also carries a political contradiction. The language of respect can become a language of unequal power when some citizens are always expected to speak respectfully to institutions that do not return that respect through effective governance. Today's insult represents, in part, a movement from deference to defiance.

bell hooks's idea of "talking back" is useful here. Speech becomes politically meaningful when people who were expected to stay silent refuse to. The Ghanaian citizen who says, in effect, I will not speak to power in the language power has prescribed for me, is performing a communicative rupture.

That rupture can be democratic. It can also be destructive. The ambiguity is the point: the Insult Medium is neither inherently liberating nor inherently pathological. It is a contested public sphere.

IV. Has the polite public sphere collapsed?

Ghana's public sphere has not collapsed, but it has changed. Jürgen Habermas imagined the public sphere as a space where citizens engage one another through rational-critical debate. Ghana's experience points to a messier reality: that ideal space was never equally open to everyone — not until technology diluted the power of the gatekeepers.

Citizens without formal education, political connections, institutional authority or elite linguistic fluency may hold perfectly legitimate grievances yet lack the vocabulary that earns those grievances a hearing. The Insult Medium changes that equation by lowering the linguistic threshold of entry. No policy terminology is needed to say this hospital has no medicine, or you broke your promise. No bureaucratic register is needed to voice anger over unemployment, galamsey, corruption, bad roads or the rising cost of living. The insult becomes an extreme form of political accessibility.

James C. Scott's notion of the "hidden transcript" is relevant here. Private resentment that once lived in taxis, tro-tros, drinking spots, markets, homes, workplaces and informal political talk can now enter the visible public transcript. The digital environment has opened the backstage.

Yet this democratisation is deeply paradoxical. Everyone has entered the room, but the room is becoming uninhabitable. Now that citizens themselves hold the gate, the space can only be made liveable again through genuine social and political negotiation.

V. Not all insults are equal

The common analytical mistake is to treat every insult as equivalent. The Insult Medium contains distinct layers of intention, power and truth. I identify four.

Stratum I: Systemic public interrogation

This is the accountability layer. The language may be aggressive, crude or culturally shocking, but its target is an identifiable public failure: galamsey, corruption, unemployment, poor healthcare, abandoned infrastructure, energy insecurity, failing schools, procurement abuses or economic hardship.

Here the insult works as what I call Public-Voice Weaponry (PVW). The vulgarity is the wrapper; the grievance is the payload. The right response is not necessarily censorship — it is investigation.

This is where the Public-Truth Filter (PTF) becomes essential for separating truth from falsehood and legitimate from illegitimate claims. The question to ask is: what share of this abusive statement contains a verifiable public grievance? A citizen can make a legitimate complaint in illegitimate language. When that happens, the state must be able to tell the two apart.

Stratum II: Partisan foot-soldiering

The second layer is partisan attack. Here the apparent anger of a citizen may in fact be organised political labour. Political actors and their supporters use insult to discredit opponents, shield party leaders, manufacture polarisation, suppress criticism, dominate online conversation and shape electoral perceptions. The danger is that genuine public anger gets captured by competing elites.

Stratum III: Metric-driven abuse

The third layer belongs to the attention economy, where outrage is a business model. The goal is not accountability but a chain: attention, engagement, followers, monetisation, visibility.

Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism is instructive. Digital platforms turn human behaviour into measurable signals, and anger is exceptionally measurable: it drives comments, shares, reactions, watch time and repeat visits. Insult becomes economically productive. A creator may discover that being outrageous pays better than being accurate. At that point the insult is no longer just political speech; it is digital labour.

Stratum IV: Pure garbage and malicious fabrication

At the bottom of the hierarchy is speech with neither meaningful political criticism nor truth value: fabricated allegations, personal humiliation, malicious gossip, threats, sexualised attacks, targeted harassment and deliberate character destruction. Here the Public-Truth Filter finds virtually no accountability value. Degradation is the objective. This is where regulation, platform governance and civic education are most clearly justified.

VI. The feminisation of the target

The Insult Medium is not gender-neutral. Men and women may share the same digital space yet be attacked through very different linguistic mechanisms.

A male politician may be called corrupt, incompetent, stupid, wicked or a thief. A woman can be called all of those things while her body, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, reproductive status and appearance are also turned into weapons against her. The attack shifts from her political performance to her embodied identity. The insult becomes a form of patriarchal social regulation.

This exposes a central contradiction within the counter-public. The same linguistic environment that lets marginalised citizens talk back can reproduce the oppression of other marginalised citizens. The revolt can reproduce the very hierarchy it claims to overthrow.

VII. Bakhtin and the grotesque degradation of power

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of grotesque realism offers a productive reading of insults in Ghana's public space.

Political elites tend to present what might be called the classical political body: polished, controlled, rational, dignified, institutionally protected and wrapped in ceremony. The ordinary citizen meets the opposite reality — polluted rivers, unemployment, overcrowded hospitals, inflation, inadequate infrastructure and insecurity.

The insult performs a symbolic reversal. It drags the elite body downward. The politician who seems untouchable in a convoy becomes, through vulgar speech, a biological human being subject to the same bodily realities as everyone else. The message of this grotesque degradation is: you are not above us.

That can be politically regenerative. But Bakhtin's grotesque is ambivalent: the same degradation that punctures elite dignity can also become empty cultural pollution. Hence a distinction between two forms:

• Regenerative grotesque: insult used to expose corruption, hypocrisy, institutional failure, inequality and political arrogance.
• Degraded grotesque: insult used for clout, misogyny, homophobia, fabricated accusations, monetised outrage and personal destruction.

The first attacks power. The second reproduces toxicity. Perhaps President Mahama's underlying concern is this: how far is Ghana willing to let the toxicity go?

VIII. Public-Expectations Deficiency and cruel optimism

The escalation of insult can also be read through Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism: people stay attached to an idealised promise even as the conditions needed to sustain it deteriorate.

Ghanaian citizens are asked to keep believing: work hard; be a participant, not a spectator; vote; stay peaceful; respect authority; trust the political system to respond. But what happens when the promised improvement repeatedly fails to arrive? Hope is exhausted.

I call the resulting condition Public-Expectations Deficiency (PED). The sequence runs:

Hope → cruel optimism → institutional failure → disappointment → PED → rage → the Insult Medium

The insult, in other words, is not necessarily the starting point. It can be the end-stage linguistic expression of disappointment accumulated across the citizenry.

IX. Lingual-Desertification

Lingual-Desertification is the central ecological metaphor of this essay. Galamsey destroys ecosystems by extracting value and leaving degradation behind. The attention economy does something similar to public language: it extracts anger, humiliation, outrage, fear, sexuality and political conflict, monetises those emotional resources, and leaves a depleted communicative environment behind.

A desertified linguistic ecosystem gradually loses empathy, patience, nuance, trust, the habit of listening, intellectual disagreement — and above all the capacity to disagree without dehumanising. In that landscape, every debate becomes a battlefield, every opponent an enemy, every correction an attack and every disagreement a chance to humiliate. Eventually the soil of public language turns infertile, like a river poisoned by mining.

X. The Digital Coyote and the linguistic borderland

Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of the borderland and Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity offer another lens on Ghana's Insult Medium. Ghanaian digital speech increasingly lives between English, Twi, Ga, Ewe, Hausa and Pidgin; between political jargon, popular culture, memes, profanity and religious language. The result is neither purely traditional nor purely Western. It is hybrid.

Out of this borderland emerges a new kind of power: the Digital Coyote. The coyote metaphor describes citizens who cross linguistic and institutional boundaries to carry suppressed information into spaces that conventional communication cannot reach. A citizen may blend English political terminology with vernacular insult and popular idiom precisely because the mix carries force — it commands public and political attention and can mobilise people toward change.

The Digital Coyote is, in this sense, a linguistic smuggler. But the metaphor carries an ethical warning and should not be romanticised. The coyote may smuggle truth. It may just as easily smuggle toxicity.

XI. Fanon and the cathartic insult

Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonial violence adds another dimension. Insult can be a response to structural domination. When the channels for expressing frustration seem blocked, pressure on the tongue looks for an outlet. The Insult Medium becomes one such outlet, allowing citizens to symbolically reverse a perceived humiliation through catharsis.

Catharsis matters, but a society cannot insult its way into good governance. Anger can expose the wound; it cannot, on its own, heal it. The political question is what follows the catharsis. Does the insult lead to investigation, reform, accountability, collective organisation or policy change? Or does it simply produce another insult?

That question leads to the need for a verification mechanism — what I call the Public-Truth Filter.

XII. The Public-Truth Filter

A modern democratic state needs a way to separate offensive language from the information it contains. The Public-Truth Filter (PTF) should assess at least five dimensions:

The filter separates two things that are routinely conflated: linguistic offensiveness and public-information value. A statement can be highly offensive and carry high public-truth value. Another can be mildly worded and carry none at all. Any public sensitisation effort must keep the two apart.

XIII. The way forward: from insults to narrative intelligence

The stakes reach beyond media studies, into national intelligence and governance. The 2005 monitoring approach read media content as an indicator of social attitudes. Contemporary narrative intelligence can extend that model by treating public language as societal sensor data.

Rather than simply counting insults, an intelligence system should track insult frequency, thematic concentration, target categories, geographic distribution, linguistic forms, sentiment, political affiliation, gendered attack patterns, misinformation, grievance themes, institutional targets and the speed of escalation.

A sudden rise in insults aimed at a particular institution can then serve as an early-warning indicator:

Rising insult frequency → recurring grievance → institutional distrust → declining legitimacy → social mobilisation → possible instability

The insult is not necessarily the threat. It may be the signal of the threat. A state that reads public insults only as evidence of indiscipline risks an intelligence error. A state facing declining institutional trust, economic frustration, political polarisation, gendered conflict, corruption allegations, youth unemployment, environmental destruction and falling expectations cannot restore stability merely by policing the language in which citizens describe those conditions.

The tongue may be the first diagnostic instrument. The question is whether the state listens before the signal becomes confrontation.

XIV. Policy implications

The answer to Ghana's Insult Medium is not a simple campaign for "respectful speech". Respect cannot be legislated into existence while institutional disrespect persists. A credible response needs at least six elements:

1. Establish public-truth monitoring. Government and civil society should build independent systems to identify the substantive grievances embedded in hostile speech.
2. Separate insult from threat. Not every insult is a security threat. Threat assessment must distinguish offensive expression, political criticism, harassment, incitement and credible threats of violence.
3. Create institutional grievance feedback loops. When thousands of citizens repeatedly complain about the same issue, the state should treat that pattern as policy intelligence.
4. Develop gender-sensitive speech monitoring. Monitoring must capture sexualised attacks on women and other forms of identity-based harassment.
5. Challenge algorithmic incentives. Platforms, regulators and civil society should examine how engagement systems reward outrage and controversy.
6. Restore the social contract. The most effective antidote to toxic public speech is not censorship but credible governance. Where institutions work, citizens have less reason to channel every grievance through rage.

Conclusion: the street is no longer asleep

The rise of the Insult Medium should not be read simply as proof that Ghanaians have forgotten how to behave. That reading is too shallow. The phenomenon has a longer genealogy: the media monitoring of 2005 already traced a link between media negativity and the wider social mood, and the documented insults that followed showed that antagonistic speech was measurable long before today's platforms existed.

What has changed is the architecture. The smartphone has democratised publication. The algorithm has monetised attention. The political party has professionalised polarisation. The influencer has commodified outrage. And the citizen has discovered that an insult travels further than a policy paper.

So the Ghanaian insult must be read on several levels. Sometimes it is garbage. Sometimes it is political theatre. Sometimes it is misogyny, partisan propaganda or digital entrepreneurship. But sometimes, beneath the vulgarity, there is a fact: a broken hospital, a polluted river, an unfinished road, a missing public service, a stolen opportunity — a citizen who has spoken politely for too long.

That is why the right response is neither celebration nor blanket condemnation. It is interpretation. The central challenge for Ghanaian democracy is to recover the information buried beneath the toxicity without reproducing the toxicity itself. That is the purpose of the Public-Truth Filter, and it is why Lingual-Desertification matters. Galamsey destroys rivers by extracting value without restoring the ecosystem. The attention economy can do the same to language, extracting attention from anger until the communicative environment itself turns barren.

The danger, then, is not simply that Ghanaians are insulting one another. It is that society may gradually lose the ability to disagree without destroying the possibility of living together.

The insult is the smoke. The question for intelligence, governance and democratic scholarship is: what is burning? The answer lies less in the insult itself than in the institutional conditions that made it necessary, profitable or powerful.

Messan Mawugbe, PhD, is Lead Consultant at TRT Intelligence & Institute of Brands Narrative Analysis. He can be reached at mawugbe@trtintelligence.com, mawugbe@ibnareports.org, nekzy@yahoo.com

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