Beyond The Apology

Alhaji Halidu Haruna
We have learnt about an apology of sorts from the source of the most damning insult yet to Ghanaian womanhood.

What Halidu Haruna, a presidential staffer, said about women who have not yet gotten married at age 30 is scathing and abrasive. It is as if not marrying at that age is a social aberration.

We view the stereotyping as evidence about the level of chauvinism in which many government appointees or those associated with the corridors of power are enmeshed.

Following the nauseating reference to female actresses who had dared to express their opinions about the energy crisis and the backlash it has generated, the man at the presidency now distances himself from the statement and is said to have expressed regrets about his unguarded rhetoric.

The heat was so much that the best option was what he rendered on the public domain as an apology. So bad was the backlash that his backers and paymasters found it prudent to turn their backs on him.

Regrets are acceptable or otherwise. So far, it does not seem that Ghanaians who frowned upon the smelly references and even expressed opprobrious responses to them have accepted the apology. Ghanaians could not have behaved otherwise, given the nature of the man who lashed out at the female actresses. Here is someone who hops from one radio station to another churning out insults on his party's political opponents, claiming to be a presidential staffer. No disclaimer until now has been issued about him, making it rather impossible to convince Ghanaians in good mental standing that he does not have anything to do with the ruling party or that his insulting spree did not meet the specifications of his bosses.

The media landscape was yesterday awash with negative reactions to his ungentlemanly reference to unmarried women and in effect, Ghanaian womanhood.

If Haruna sought to use his disdainful expression as another footnote to climb the political ladder in his party, he got it all wrong, given what he has earned in terms of negative public opinion so far.

Expression of regrets when they are seethed in sincerity must definitely be accepted. Not so when they can pass for crocodile tears, as in the case of the subject under review.

The expression of regrets as the source of the uncouth description did was an act of convenience for the dousing of the fire stoked by the smelly insult.

There have been similar below-belt invectives in the past originating from political babies with protruding incisors which, regardless of their weight, were not worthy of sanctions from the appointing officers.

This perhaps is one factor accounting for the public rejection of the regrets Halidu has expressed so far as evidenced from the insults hurled at him yesterday.

Politics is not about lies and insults. Unfortunately, in our local circumstances, that is the case as players on the political terrain fall over one another with freshly minted insults for people the ages of their fathers as a way of catching the attention of their paymasters.