Features
Chopmoney wahala!
Chopmoney should be dished out with extreme care
In some homes, money is no problem. As Kwame Korkorti would put it, money is not a small boy! That is when money flows like the Rivers of Babylon and chopmoney is no problem at all.
Anyone who wants cash goes to Daddy’s drawer and collects a handful. It is an offence to account for any money you take, for the simple reason that to account for monies taken from Daddy’s drawer would be seen as undermining Daddy’s credibility as someone who is filthy rich. Standards must be maintained. Everyone must feel free to spend.
It is the responsibility of someone to always make sure that the drawer is filled to capacity. Such a person faces severe sanctions if Madam comes to pick up the day’s chop money and finds the drawer only half-full.
SABOTAGE
It would be regarded as sabotage of the highest order. The person is likely to be charged with the domestic version of treasonable felony. The punishment is that the person’s daily pocket money of ¢300,000 will be reduced by a quarter.
Madam goes to shop with a househelp who is perpetually excited. She sees new things everyday, eats new varieties of baked beans and cornflakes. In the process, she refuses to believe that heaven is anywhere else other than in Daddy’s home.
All men are not equal! As it were, every human society is one akin to an animal farm. Some are born with a silver spoon in their mouths; others die like church mice. Still others simply do not exist.
Whatever it is, both the poor and rich must eat everyday, so the issuance of chopmoney is common to every home. It is the mode of disbursement that differs.
Where money is a scarce commodity, the chopmoney must be dished out with extreme care. It must be balanced against rent, electricity and water bills, food and medicare. Where the balance is thrown out of gear, then the man must either become a magician and do wonders or turn a financial wizard and engage himself in mysteries.
Financial magic is a professional course most Sikaman husbands take in order to enable them qualify as responsible husbands. The only problem is that they are not issued with certificates after graduation. Most laughable is the fact that they never realise that they have enrolled to study Financial Magic and have passed out with flying colours.
Furthermore, in the days of Kutu Acheampong, Ghana started receiving world acclaim as a country, where every man is a magician who has studied in the college of how to make ends meet.
Those were the days when Ghanaians were asked to tighten their belts. But it was needless to ask them to tighten their belts, because they naturally had to, since their waistlines were nothing to write home about; and anyone who didn’t tighten his belt was bound to walk about naked. His pair of trousers would simply give way.
SECRET
In those ways, husbands were wary about the chopmoney they dished out. They were aware that wives had also gone to school to study how to over-estimate the daily chopmoney by discreetly inflating prices by a secret percentage on groceries and all consumables.
The wives were skilled-in over and under-invoicing, and the husbands had clear evidence of the newly acquired skills of their dear wives.
The wives were constantly buying new funeral cloths, changing hairstyles, purchasing fashionable footwear, surprisingly without accessing foreign loans. It was a mystery husbands who could not unravel unless they became aware that their wives’ domestic accounting skills had become legendary.
Somehow, the women were justified in engaging in domestic budgetary acrobatics and gymnastics to buy for themselves their needs because their husbands were not prepared to do that.
Moreover, they complained that their husbands smoked, drank akpeteshie and chased women with their meagre salaries. After all these, they came back home and snored like pigs. So why shouldn’t the women resort to ‘chobo’ to get a few things for themselves?
DEMAND
Today, men have started demanding that their wives should get ready to start dishing out chopmoney in the wake of a new Bill that is seeking to make man and woman equal before God and Man. Men will no longer be considered head of the home and cannot insist on sex when their wives are not in the mood.
In that case, it would be difficult to come to terms with the fact that he who pays the piper does not call the tune. In any event of equality, rights as well as responsibilities must be shared across board.
Women should be required to give 50 per cent of the chopmoney and retain the right to ‘no sex’ and the freedom to wear double shorts to bed instead of a simple nightgown.
I wonder what will become of the culture that has propelled African marriages to outlast their European counterparts. Our fathers and fore-fathers, mothers and their forebears stayed put in marriage, sustained through an ideal cultural setting.
Should this cultural setting become disturbed by man-made laws, the introduction of alien values and whims, marriage as an institution is bound to undergo a cataclysmic transformation.
The result will be widespread divorce, the proliferation of single mothers and a new breed of prostitutes, the abandonment of marital responsibilities, and the perpetration and perpetuation of marital and domestic license and anarchy. God bless Sikaman.
This article was first published
on February 22, 2003
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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