Features
The epidemic of failing marriages
Observing the typical Sikaman family from afar, one can really be amused. You won’t fall to see a family member behaving exactly like a Vice-President and another doubling like a Trades Union Congress (TUC) man.
There is also every chance for you to meet an opposition flag bearer and if you’re lucky, you’d meet the President himself, His Excellency Sir Kwame Korkorti, commander-in-chief of the family forces, head of state of the Republic of Korkorti and Sons.
There are various family types with some having the wife as the President for reasons too obvious to mention. They are the breadwinners, and on top of that, they wield the power of the laddle; meaning that the portofolio of the kitchen is under their armpit.
In such a situation, the husband ceases to be a power broker. At best he is a linguist. He doesn’t make the rules, he interprets them. Such a family is a stable one because the woman is a better manager of family resources for the fact that she doesn’t spend on alcohol. She may take ‘quarter’ once in a while, but that is only to trigger off a dull appetite against fufu and groundnut soup.
The sad thing about the Sikaman family is that many of them do not last these days. It is also a fact akin to a worrisome global trend. In the United States, three out of every five marriages end on the rocks. In Russia getting married today and getting divorced the next dawn is a common phenomenon.
Press reports on the Russian situation denote a sad palaver of a super-power society. Russian women are blamed for most of the divorces. According to observers, they are unfaithful to their husbands, a factor that has skyrocketed the incidence of the divorce comedy.
Some, however, blame capitalism on the bad turn of events. With a liberal political and economic atmosphere, everyone is said to be liberated, adventurous wives inclusive. So their husbands must bear with the situation or quit. No compromise!
The Russian situation isn’t an isolated one, though. The whole palaver is that divorce is becoming a global epidemic, a disease no vaccine is able to prevent. I was sad when Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley got divorced.
The lady claimed Mike could not do “things” to her. “He didn’t know I ever existed”, she bemoaned the last days of a tragedy-hit marriage. If that is true, then I’m sorry for her. She should have taken someone like Kokotako. It would have been a different story altogether, because the guy regularly drinks the dregs of palmwine. No lady comes and goes back without a dream in her heart.
Tyson and Lady Diana
Talk about the marriage of Mike Tyson to the beautiful Robin Givens and you’ll realise how it all started fairy-tale-like and ended in a bedroom that and often been transformed into a boxing ring – a mini Madison Square Garden.
When Tyson took Givens and her mother to Russia, I guess the cold entered into Mike’s head and he chased wife and mother around a hotel swearing to kill them.
The old lady did not know she was a good sprinter until the occasion presented itself. And she ran as if she had mad-cow disease. The die was certainly cast. In a television appearance with Mike, Givens told the interviewer that her husband suffered psychiatric problems and beat her. Mike could not bear it any longer. They divorced.
The marriage between Prince Charles and Lady Diana and its tragic coda is one that has brought doubts whether the monarchy is worth perpetuating or dismantling. My own opinion is that the monarchy is no longer worth a dime. Not with all these sexual tragicomedies inundating the centre of the royal family by a relentless osmosis.
Anyway, before the marriage, an astrologer announced it would not last. The prince, a Scorpio and the princess a Cancer, both of the water group were supposed to experience a very boring marriage. With a supposedly incompatible birth numbers and whatever, the astrologer declared the marriage was disaster-bound.
It is not, however, clear whether it is a prophecy come true or the marriage could have been saved if both had wanted to preserve the honour of the monarchy. And with the prince and princess having been very liberal with desecrating the temple of God in adulterous escapades, the monarchy has lost the moral legitimacy of its existence. Moreso when other members of the royal family like Fergie have been too morally wayward for the sanctity of and reverence for the throne.
In Sikaman, the cause of rock-bound marriage include money palaver, infidelity, sexual incompatibility, boredom and common snoring. Well, some wives complain that when their husband snore, the foundation of the building shakes. So they experience mini earthquakes at night and cannot sleep. So they must go to their parents and complain.
The palaver is that in some cases the women out-snore the men, but the men rarely complain. It is normally the women who complain to their parents as a first step to quitting the marriage.
“I am terrified”, a wife will tell her parents. “I can’t sleep even if I take valium.
When he takes akpeteshie before supper, it is worse. It is like his nose has been plugged to high-voltage electricity. I can’t stand it any longer. One day the building will collapse on us”.
“But didn’t you know the man was a dangerous snorer before you decided to stay with him?” her father would ask.
“At first it was not so serious. Now it has become like a criminal offence since he is depriving me of my sleep. He has to be put before the High Court”.
Problems associated with marriage can be minimised with counselling before and after marriage.
Very good marriage counsellors teach you how to become sexually compatible, how to resolve family crisis, how to bring excitement into a dull marriage and how to tone down a vibrating nose.
This is what the churches do these days. They have trained marriage counsellors that take prospective couples through the theory and practice of marriage. Perhaps if Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie had been counselled, it would have been a different matter today.
And Lady Diana would still have been in the arms of the Prince of Wales.
This article was first published on Saturday, November 2, 1996
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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