4 ideas
In Akan speech, 'sebi' (as in 'sebi tafrakye') is said before an offensive or taboo remark, asking pardon in advance. The columns use this politeness formula as their standing licence: the writer formally apologises, then says the rude, true thing about politicians and officials. The ritual keeps the social surface intact while the content gets through.
The satire treats small shared habits, such as lateness, queue-jumping, funeral excess and the petty self-importance of clerks, as the same failures that show up at the national level. Once readers laugh at the habit in themselves, the politician's version stops looking like someone else's pathology. Blame moves from 'them' to a culture everyone takes part in.
Criticism written in Ghanaian English, with pidgin and local idiom mixed in, gets forwarded and shared because readers recognise their own speech in it. Formal editorial prose about the same failures is read once and dropped. How far a critique travels depends on whether readers want to repeat it in their own voice.
In a political culture where direct accusations draw partisan retaliation or insult charges, comic exaggeration lets a writer name abuses while keeping deniability. The joke frame makes it hard to hit back without looking humourless. So satire can say things a straight op-ed cannot.