I'm yet to recover from the shocking television footage of the two Kasoa teenagers in the bucket of a police pickup vehicle and the bloody body of the 10-year old boy they killed for money rituals. I turned away from the TV set immediately and my day, yesterday, was ruined. The action of these teenagers is shocking, but I'm not shocked that our country has got this far and can get worse. We worship money without questioning its source.

If any idiot steals, cheats, or uses the foulest of means to make money, they sit in the media and public platforms to spew trash and we worship them. Once you're rich, you can circumvent all the laws of the land and go unpunished. In politics, you wield authority. In the church, you occupy the front pew and become an elder. In the media, you're featured in personality profiles and you tell more lies about how you made it.

In today's Ghana, the end justifies the means. If you question the means, you're said to be jealous. Some people miss no opportunity to insult intellectuals because someone who's not an intellectual makes money. "What have the professors and their big English to show all these years? Without education so so and so has made money and is impacting society. That's what is important," they would say. I'm not saying people don't make genuine money here. Some do.

You see their business and you see their organic growth and impact. You can trace their sources of wealth, which match their cash flows. If the owners of Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and others are among the world's richest, you can trace their products and services to every part of the globe. If someone builds an investment like Accra Mall or the A&C Mall and he or she is rich, you can point to some solid investment they have made and are harvesting returns.

So I have nothing wrong with people who make money. My issue is how we have elevated wealth above every other human consideration and worship people whose wealth is tainted with fraud or blood. We have hardened criminals parading as businessmen, and they spend their entire lives telling cock and bull stories about how they made their money. Those who question them are said to be PhD (pull him down) holders.

We present them as role models and encourage everyone to be like them. The youth (and even children) are observing keenly, and some are taking notes. So we shouldn't be surprised that teenagers are killing for money rituals. There are more killers like the Kasoa teenagers. Those who use our money to award fraudulent contracts and people die because there are no beds in the hospital have killed and continue to kill for money.

(President John Mahama was right when equated corruption to mass murder.) The Kasoa teenagers have wasted a precious life. Many more lives are wasted daily in different sectors of our nation because some people think they must make money by hook or crook. And the people who worship them are their accomplices in such murders.

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You can reach the writer, Manasseh Azure Awuni, through azureachebe2@yahoo.com.