Divorces Are the New Normal, By the Way

Divorces are very personal in nature; and oftentimes, it is only one side of the story that gets full play in the media. Which is why I do not find them that interesting as Breaking News Stories. But, of course, when they involve the lives of the rich, famous and powerful, then, they become newsworthy or are routinely deemed to be newsworthy. What is not newsworthy is not the subject of divorce as such, for it is nauseatingly pedestrian. What is newsworthy is the fact that wealth and riches that are supposed to make marriages happier and more “sumptuous” and “delicious” are often actually the tinder or great motivation for divorces. Perhaps it is because the most powerful Prophet in Judeo-Christian Religion – which includes Judaism, Christianity and Islam – earlier on recognized “Mormon” to be the root cause of all evil. Then again, as often as not, Mormon may not be the cause of conjugal rift at all. Oftentimes, it has far more to do with the chemistry and/or chemical compounds in the bedroom.

And then, of course, the pedestrian canker of familiarity or getting cloyed with too much of a good thing. In the case of Mrs. Gloria Assan Arhin and Mr. Eugene Kofi Bentum Arhin, at least from the version of the divorce papers filed by Mrs. Arhin, it well appears that the “power Couple,” as it were, invested an overwhelming amount of their conjugal time or the duration of their marriage in the acquisition of too many “immovable” or real-estate properties, including, according to Mrs. Arhin, two separate buildings, each containing 16 units of apartments and several stand-alone buildings or bungalows and mansions. Now, that is something decent to write home about. But when the relationship has been shipwrecked by mutual salvos of incrimination and recrimination, then the acquisition of such properties, at least as the contours of my very circumscribed imagination envisages, does not practically amount to the figurative Hill-of-Beans.

Of course, for the children produced by or from the marriage, it is hunky-dory. For, I tend to perceive the healthy acquisition of landed property as a gift for one’s children and grandchildren. Outside of this realm of human existence, it is all cottonwool and caskets, if the Dear Reader knows what I mean. But, of course, I also fully recognize the fact that this is all a veritable figment of my personal imagination. You see, the average life-expectancy of even the most well-heeled Ghanaians does not extend much beyond 70 years old. And for our most powerful politicians, it often hovers around the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies; the Akufo-Addos and the Kufuors are, of course, few and far between, that is, more of the exception than the norm or the rule. Interestingly, though, the kind of scenario that I have in mind here is one in which I imagine myself rallying the wives of all Ghanaian politicians, most especially the most pathologically corrupt, by getting their wives to rise up against these unconscionable crooks and scam artists, US Capitol Hill-fashion, and serving them, all at once, with their divorce papers.

You see, I am far, far less interested in the divorces themselves than the seismic and miserable fallouts from the same. Which, obviously, is the Declaration of Assets of the couples almost invariably by their wives or better-halves, tritely speaking, that is. I have absolutely no idea that Mr. Eugene Kofi Bentum Arhin is anywhere among the handful of Ghanaian politicians or highly placed public servants who are known to have declared or published a list of their assets or properties, movable and immovable or unmovable, for that matter. But, of course, it well appears that Mrs. Gloria Assan Arhin has done a very good, or even genius, work of declaring the assets of the couple and thus has enabled us to peek into what a typical Ghanaian politician, these days, may be up to, in terms of wealth and property acquisition. Now, the next most logical unspoken follow-up question becomes: How did this couple come to acquire such fairly decent and humongous assets and properties in such a short time, assuming that, in fact, Mrs. Arhin is telling us the gospel truth?

Which is really not such a big deal, after all, when one reckons the mind-busting fact that the Forbes List of the Richest Ghanaians has seasoned kleptocratic politicians like Little Dramani being worth in excess of $ 1 Billion (USD). I met the man called Kofi Bentum once at Jubilee House and spoke to him, briefly, about two or three times by phone. I am here, once again, talking about Brother Eugene Arhin, who also happens to be the President’s Communications Director. I, for one, do not see any reason why he should not be able or capable of acquiring the conjugally shared properties that Aunt “Araba” Gloria Assan attributes to this power couple. But I am only thinking about how much of his fabled wealth the former late President Jeremiah John Rawlings took with him to Mother Earth the other day. Of course, as I hinted earlier on in this very column about the offspring of our protagonists, such property and wealth acquisition and/or acquisitiveness is almost invariably about the children and not the acquisitors themselves. Thus, the existence of such nationalistic terminologies as “Heritage” and “Patrimony.”

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

February 11, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]