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20.02.2021 Feature Article

Kofi Bentum, Really, for the Dignity of Your Wife Gloria?

Kofi Bentum, Really, for the Dignity of Your Wife Gloria?
20.02.2021 LISTEN

Her name is “Gloria” or glory, so it is perfectly understandable that her husband would express his determination to shield his estranged wife from the self-inflicted indignities that washing one’s proverbial dirty linen in public is apt to entail. You see, there is something ironic here, if not also downright absurd; and it inheres in the fact that one simply cannot protect or shield another from the indignities that the subject of such indignities may clearly have brought upon herself. That is the case of Mrs. Gloria Assan Arhin, wife of Mr. Eugene Kofi Bentum Arhin, Director of Communications at the Akufo-Addo Presidency (See “Owners of Properties Listed Among Eugene Arhin’s Pop Up” MyNewsGH.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/12/21). It is quite obvious that it was the lawyers for the estranged Mrs. Arhin or the latter herself that leaked her divorce papers to the media.

I can also appreciate that portion of Mr. Arhin’s tentative response, in which the respondent to the divorce suit, yet to be heard in court, as of this writing, says that he is intent on protecting the dignity of his children and thus will not descend into the gutter to publicly duke it out dirty and naked with his estranged wife and her assigns and attorneys. And Kofi Bentum is right, each and every marriage in our universe has its fair share of challenges and must not be dealt with in the public arena, especially where it also entails a lawsuit that is yet to be heard in a legitimately constituted court of law. So far, the members of the National Democratic Congress’ opposition political establishment are having a field day, although the respondent also appears to be gaining strength and credibility vis-à-vis his version of the story, especially regarding the fact of whether, indeed, Mr. Arhin actually owns all the properties that his estranged wife claims in her divorce papers that the respondent owns.

There is also something tacky about the fact that the contents of Mrs. Arhin’s grievances against her husband, as a result of which she is seeking permanent separation, should be published by both the regular mainstream media and the gossipy social media well before the respondent to the suit had been officially served with the same. This is clearly not a woman who either deserves or craves the sort of privacy and dignity that her soon-to-be-ex-husband insists on decking her in or literally imposing on her. So far, we have been alerted to the fact of several private citizens popping out of the blue or the proverbial woodwork to claim bona fide ownership of some of the properties that Mrs. Arhin claims to be owned by her husband and whose building or construction she also claims to have personally supervised, while also doubling up as the primary caretaker of the power couple’s three, or so, children.

I have also been reticent and reluctant to take up this story for public discussion because I read somewhere quite a while ago, that Mr. Arhin was quite a remarkable businessman who had acquired a decent amount of personal wealth and landed properties prior to being named Communications Director to the Akufo-Addo Presidency. I am also confident that the truth of the wealth acquisitions of the respondent will be indubitably revealed in court. But I could also not help but be reminded of what Pastor Emmanuel Badu Kobi, the Mahama Spiritual Guide, had to stereotypically remark about the “Congenital Stupidity of the Typical Fante Wife” or Woman, a bit of which one sees in the clearly inadvisable decision by Mrs. Gloria Assan Arhin to literally wash her dirty conjugal linen in our public square. And some may even say, Ghanaians witnessed another bit of such dumbness in the rather scandalous decision by Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the Rawlings hatchet woman, to pair up with an irreparably politically damaged Candidate John “Expedition-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama for the 2020 Presidential Election.

That both the insufferably and pathologically haughty former President and his former “Mis-Education” Minister are veritable political opportunists can scarcely be gainsaid. Jane Opoku-Agyemang ran on her vacuous and patently nonexistent credentials as a feminist, whereas Little Dramani cheaply decided to take undue advantage of the same. Actually, Naana Opoku-Agyemang peevishly ran on the dubious strength of her physiognomy or raw genitalia-determined gender as her primary political tool or claim to fame and influence. As an Education Minister, the first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast had actually regressed the quality of the country’s public school system. In any event, in the Arhin divorce suit’s fallout, the political headache of President Akufo-Addo inheres in the latter’s epic failure to stringently pursue his anticorruption electioneering-campaign agenda, from the get-go, by not rigorously prosecuting the double-salary ministerial scam-artists of the previous regime.

Interestingly but not altogether surprisingly, it is such reprobate Mahama lookalike characters as Messrs. Haruna Iddrisu, Mahama Ayariga and Inusah Fuseini who have today shamelessly assumed a patently undeserved moral high ground and are luridly thumbing their noses at Nana Akufo-Addo on the critical question of the uphill fight against official corruption. In other words, if President Akufo-Addo had relentlessly launched and doggedly pursued his much-touted war on official corruption right from January 8, 2017, political confidants like Mr. Arhin would most definitely have pursued a much more modest and cautious course towards the acquisition of private wealth as officials of public trust. It is, of course, not too late for Nana Akufo-Addo to pick up and promptly repair the broken pieces of whatever remains of his rather wobbly anticorruption fight.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

February 13, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]

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