NewsOmar Sterling on "Stay Up": why buy data to depress yourself?
Track five on VTH 2 asks the question every phone owner in Ghana knows at two in the morning, and its title means two things.
"Stay Up" is track five on VTH 2, the 2025 album by Omar Sterling of R2Bees. It is produced by JOEYONTHETRACK and was mixed and mastered by DAMATICMIX.
The question
The line people quote is a question: why buy data to depress yourself? Ghana had 24.3 million internet users at the start of 2025 and nearly 8 million social media users, according to DataReportal's Digital 2025 report. Most of them pay for that access bundle by bundle, so a night of doomscrolling is paid for.
Tema to Trade Fair
The song goes back to 1999 and a walk from Tema towards Trade Fair in La, Accra, on foot rather than by trotro or taxi. The Trade Fair land was acquired under Kwame Nkrumah in 1960 and the first fair opened in February 1967. The Tema Motorway between the two places is 19 kilometres long.
Things fall apart
Omar borrows the title of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel, which itself takes its words from W. B. Yeats's 1919 poem "The Second Coming". In the book, Okonkwo spends his life afraid of looking weak and falls anyway. In the song, the same words explain why you stay up: strong men fall too.
Two meanings
The song also touches on poverty used as a weapon at election time, which the episode reads as small money and T-shirts handed out for votes. No party is named in the song.
The best bar on VTH 2 is not a boast. It is a question about the bundle you bought this morning and what you spent it on. "Stay up" is what you tell a friend who is struggling, and it is also what you do with your phone at 2 a.m. Omar Sterling means both.
- Audiomack: VTH 2 tracklist, "Stay Up" at track 5 (released 7 Oct 2025, R2bees Entertainment)
- TuneCore and the YouTube Topic upload: credits, produced by JOEYONTHETRACK, mixed and mastered by DAMATICMIX
- Wikipedia and GhanaWeb: Trade Fair land acquired 1960, first fair February 1967
- Wikipedia, "Things Fall Apart", and Mail & Guardian: Achebe's 1958 novel, title from Yeats's "The Second Coming" (1919)
- DataReportal, Digital 2025 Ghana, and Class FM: 24.3 million internet users, 7.95 million social media users
Every factual line in this story is checked against at least two independent sources, unless the text says it comes from one report.