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25.09.2022 Feature Article

I Would Have Done the Same to the Kwabre-North NPP-MP

I Would Have Done the Same to the Kwabre-North NPP-MP
25.09.2022 LISTEN

It is not really newsworthy, so I am still scratching my noggins and trying to figure out how a brief news story captioned “A Waiter Told Me to Get Up, Gave My Seat to Chinese Guys at a Kumasi Pub – NPP MP Laments” got published with a banner news headline on my favorite media portal, namely, Modernghana.com (9/15/22). As the title explicitly lays out its contents, the news story really had to do with the level of the abjectly indescribable ignobility or downrightly insufferable level of disgrace to which Ghanaian leaders and politicians have reduced themselves, their image and reputation and that of our beloved country withal.

Actually, Ghana is not “beloved” by anybody, really, least of all, the Afropean economic opportunists and parasites called Parliamentarians, like Mr. Collins Adomako-Mensah, the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for the Afigya-Kwabre Constituency, in the Asante Region, who is also quoted in the afore-referenced news story as claiming that he and a group of several friends were rudely bumped off their seats at a Kumasi watering hole or beer bar, and had their legitimately offered seats almost immediately taken from them and offered to a bunch of ragamuffin Chinese-looking men who had just entered the unidentified bar or pub.

Now, I find this story to be quite fascinating but decidedly pedestrian because this is the sort of short-shrift treatment that our environmentally degenerate and downright suicidal politicians, especially operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), ought to have been subjected to ad-nauseam ever since they decided that illegal small-scale Chinese miners digging the earth for our mineral wealth by recklessly and wantonly polluting our waterbodies and forestry resources and laying our entire ecological system to waste, were far more important than the bona fide Ghanaian citizens who live on the land and have absolutely nowhere else to go, including being granted residential and citizenship status in China, should the land of their birth become no longer sustainable for human life and existence.

What is equally fascinating is the fact that the waiter at the beer bar or drinking club or eatery where Mr. Adomako-Mensah was bumped off his seat, together with several of his friends, in deference to a nondescript group of Chinese-looking customers, we are informed, was well aware of the fact of the target of deliberate abuse and humiliation being a legitimately elected Representative of Ghana’s National Assembly. So, very likely, it was the proprietor or owner or manager of the club who ordered the unnamed waiter to remove the Afigya-Kwabre-North NPP-MP and his guests or friends from their assigned seats and more courteously offer the same seats to the Chinese customers. There may, however, be several missing puzzles here which the Modern Ghana reporter woefully failed to fill his/her readers in on.

My own gut reaction is that the unnamed watering-hole could very well be Chinese- or Korean-owned, knowing what many of us know, these days, about the establishment and ownership of business enterprises in Ghana. I must also highlight the fact that throughout this brief commentary, I have desisted from strictly affirming the ethnic identity of the aforesaid Chinese customers or their nationality, as reported by the Modern Ghana reporter, because, for all anyone cares to know, they may not be Chinese nationals at all but ethnic Koreans or a different nationality of Asians. And while, geographically, the Chinese and the Koreans are contiguous to one another, nevertheless, Chinese and Koreans do not mutually interchangeably identify themselves with one another, even in faraway places like Ghana which is known to contain the largest number of Chinese and Korean nationals on the African Continent.

Then also, knowing what I already know about the avaricious temperament of many an average Ghanaian entrepreneur, it very well may be that the Chinese customers are regular bigtime customers of the aforesaid pub or drinking club and therefore economically far more valuable to the business than this likely occasional visitor or customer who was obviously not recognized as one of the major and regular patrons of the club. Plus, this could very well be the start of a protest revolution of “Arab Spring” proportions against our largely absentminded and socially and environmentally irresponsible, kleptocratic and pathologically self-infatuated leaders and politicians. Whatever the real case scenario may be, to tell the Dear Reader the unvarnished truth, I sincerely couldn’t give a hoot even if Mr. Adomako-Mensah and his guests or friends and associates had had a bucket of swill or porcine urine literally sloshed on them.

At any rate, if for absolutely nothing at all, at least the Chinese are making an equally heck of a seismic impact on Ghana’s socioeconomic and cultural development in ways that cannot be favorably argued in favor of our morally and socioeconomically bankrupt, myopic and downright self-destructive politicians and their chuckleheaded associates, to wit, the so-called invested, indigenous traditional Ghanaian rulers.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

September 15, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]

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