I took my usual 30 kilometers walk to the dark skinned woman who sells my favourite butter bread in the wooden shop near the Kasoa traffic light. She smiles anytime I get there, as though my presence would guarantee her a good night sleep.

Truth is, she relished my presence.

As I drew closer, I realized activities around had been brought to a standstill. The cars from the four ends of the road have been stopped by officers of the Motor Traffic and Transport Unit (MTTU).

I saw armed military and policemen, quite an unusual scene, around the traffic light. People looked frozen to the spot - phone repairers, market women and children selling pure water.

A lady tossed the question: ‘who is coming?’ on her lips as she chewed her gum. She bubbled it with the help of her tongue. ‘Ta’ the sound went and she giggled locking her eyes into mine. I quickly looked away.

Still without a clue of what was at stake, I economized my steps as I drew closer to the bread seller. She smiled and I replied. She reached for her left ear with her right hand to adjust the headset she had inside. I shoveled ȼ5.00 out of my pocket to her and called out: "3 cedis butter bread. I want the soft one".

I always ask her to give me soft bread but often they are harder than requested.

She nodded as though responding to me, but I realized she was nodding to the rhythm of the song she was listening on her phone.

She wrapped the bread in a black plastic bag and handed it to me. I felt it. It’s not soft. I felt anger begin to gather in my head against this woman who had no clue what was about to happen to her.

I gnashed my teeth as she hands the change to me.

‘Thank you’, she said.

I gave her one of my default nods in response. I couldn’t explain what was happening inside of me but it appears the kind that opposes bad deals, especially the wrong bread she gave me.

As I moved onto the road I saw motor riders’ heading for Accra. They were soon to be followed by seven, as I took the count, black V8 cars burying the president’s car in the middle of the Ghana flag and the flag of the presidency sitting on the mouth of the car.

I stopped to examine the excitement on the faces of onlookers - beamed and tossed to others the way an infection spreads. The police officers were not left in the excitement. They each froze their right-hand midair saluting the Commander-In-Chief of the nation while holding their legs together until the president’s car sped past them.

A boy shouted: ‘respect the old man’. He smiled. I guess he was the only one.

A man who was then seconds away from me took a step closer. ‘Occupying a leadership position in Ghana is sweet’, he said. He had a sort of formidable air around him. I turned to face him in acknowledgment of his unsolicited opinion.

He smiled and threw out the right hand as though demonstrating something to me. I replied but never stopped looking at his right hand.

He gazed at me in the kind that suggests he’s found a friend in me or something like that.

‘This is our country, but the poor are left out in the prosperity of the nation’, he continued.

He went on to give me some analysis to stress his point. As he talked, my mind went back to the butter bread seller. The pile of bread she had arranged today looked enticing like the sunny thighs of a woman. Who wouldn’t want a bite?

In similar fashion, building prosperity in this country must be socially engineered to benefit everyone – the poor, socially disadvantaged persons, physically challenged persons and the rich alike.

President Mahama cannot borrow money from external source only to use part of it to finance the greed of his men and spend little on infrastructural development and poverty alleviation. It may appear funny, we are in our own country but some are dying of common curable diseases whilst our leaders fancy supermarket conferences because they will walk away with fat allowances.

No Ghanaian is happy with his sordid situation. What the unemployed graduates or jobless youths in the country want is a government that is responsive not about how to bleed the country dry of its resources, but about addressing the plights of the people.

They want a government that is concerned, not about the next election, but about a solid foundation for the prosperity of the country.

If the governing National Democratic Congress is caring, as government officials and the President sound, unemployed graduates would not have picketed the Employment Ministry on April 4 to register their displeasure about their situation.

And if President Mahama could read the sign on the wall, he would have cautioned his appointees to stop peddling stories of absurdity in the country about his government’s achievements and rather stick to doing the best with the nation’s oil money.

This is our country. We all deserve to taste the national cake.

I believe strongly that when the prosperity cake is shared with justice, fairness, care, humanness, love, patriotism, and future-mindedness, would be enough to satisfy the greed of all of us and not some of us.

Remember: the whole is better, stronger and active than the sum of all of us.

Ghana is our inheritance, and like the traditional butter bread which was bequeathed to us by our forebears, we all need to taste it.

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