To Drop A Yam Is To Uproot A Yam

To drop or uproot a yam is to remove it from a position. So whether the social media generation calls it drop or we of the baby boomer advanced generation say uproot, the result is the same: removal.

Our dear continent of yesteryears' independence founding fathers and latter day military dictators now has droppable or ready-to-be-uprooted leader yams. Uncomfortably, there are yams all over the continent.

I mean a yam is a national leader who is entrusted with so much resource but fails to develop the nation because s/he is unable to effectively harness the resources.

S/he dumbly, and out of greed to enrich self, family and friends, creates a culture of corruption and thieving.

From the west coast to the south coast of the continent, they abound. My anago classmate political science professor, who is partially our motherland made, links that phenomenon of selfish and greedy leadership with buffoonery in leadership roles. It is a description which should fit an eccentric megalomaniac misfit, who claims to cure all ailments and kills human beings because they choose to dissent his outrageous policies.

Indeed, if in the 21 st Century all you can think about in leading a nation is ploughing everything into the dirty private pockets of your kin and hangers on, my classmate should be accurately referencing your behaviour. And, actually, if after a whole developed economy is bequeathed to you, you choose to live a life of women and glittering mansions as indicator of your value as a leader while your people are stuck in conditions of abject poverty, the professor must have portrayed you well.

Not many would dispute that these are yams, leaders of cheap, little or no worth who should be dropped by the young or uprooted by the old from the positions that give them the stealing blank cheque. That should be the preoccupation of all who care to see the continent advance in human and material development.

That should be the expectation of the continent motherland: something her politicians should visualise and work to attain. It should be a continent where lights don't go off anyhow; where jobs are abundant; and where opportunities for self-improvement through quality and affordable education and health care prevail.

Truly, just like there are many ways for killing a cat, there are many ways for dropping or uprooting a yam. A cat, though, is a cat, is a cat, whereas there are varieties of yam of different levels of buffoonery.

There is pona, Abeeku's pona, the craving for which he deceptively uses to blackmail the mother from any encounter with the stepfather. There is also dɔkɔbrℇ, perhaps of higher quality because it doesn't rot as fast as pona although with almost equally good taste as pona. Afasee, the watery one as distinguished from bayepa or nkamfoɔ (the yellow with unique sharp taste) are others. Cocoyam, fast disappearing to become an endangered plant specie, is also a variety of yam mainly because it shares its root crop characteristic.

I am not sure if the self-acclaimed cat killer has specific ways for killing specific cats. For the various types of yams, they may each be dropped in similar way. There are almost as many ways of uprooting a yam, though, as there are types. Afaseℇ  is uprooted differently from kookooase bayerℇ,  which differs in its harvesting techniques of uprooting from nkamfoÉ”.

Kookooase, like habayerℇ, matures in such quantity of a size that it cannot all be harvested at once. There is usually something remaining to be harvested at another date. It shares its harvesting technique with habayerℇ, that variety which grows in the wild, spreads out into more than a single tuber which can all be harvested at once or in one or two pieces.

The human yam who greedily consumed oil resources with his family and cronies has been dropped by the young and uprooted by the old. They had had enough of a wife's profligate spending, as well as the tomfooling vulgarity of a daughter showered with some eighty SUVs as wedding present and her wedding guests walking away with gold plated iPhones.

All the yams herein remaining would have to be dropped or uprooted. They will all be dropped or uprooted. They can stash up in Dubai or Paris or wherever. They will be uprooted. What they should be thinking about is how they can enjoy their post-drop, post-uprooted days.

If they don't slow down their wealth grabbing, they can be sure they would be grabbed in retribution no matter where they try to hide. The digital internet social media world is harder to hide in. You actually can't hide.

By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh