The Badu Kobi Meltdown – Part 4

I recently read a news article in which the wife of Mr. Emmanuel Badu Kobi, namely, Mama Gloria Kobi, was alleged to have told popular independent talk-show host, Mr. Kofi Adoma “Nwanwani” (The Wonder Boy), of Kofi-TV fame, that because of the advent of social media, and the proliferation of social media platforms, as it were, a lot of people had hidden behind any computer with “2 kilobyte data to rain uncouth words on people of noble repute” (See “Curses May Befall Those Insulting My Husband – Wife of Prophet Badu Kobi Warns” GhBase.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/2/19). Mrs. Gloria Kobi was also reported to have alleged that her husband had been victimized on social media by many a cyber-bully for the past few days; and that this excruciating experience necessitated the need for heeding the advice of those “discerning” Ghanaians who have called for the regulation of social media platforms.

For me, however, what was even more scandalous, if also inexcusably blasphemous, about Mrs. Kobi’s interview with Kofi-TV, was the curious suggestion that, somehow, it was Divine Providence or God, who had revealed to the leader and founder of the Glorious Wave International Church that Asante women were not “marriage material” or marriageable because they, each and every one of them, had a very bad attitude, including the temperament of inordinate acquisitiveness and abject disrespect for their husbands. Perhaps the next most logical question to ask is this: Why did God have to wait for so long, and only for Mr. Badu Kobi to get married to his Asante-born and bred wife before revealing to this so-called prophet that Mr. Badu Kobi had, after all, made the downright egregious mistake of marrying an Asante woman?

What kind of callous and mischievous deity or divinity could Mr. Kobi be receiving such scandalous and gratuitously invidious messages from? We pose this question because on the YouTube videoclip which went viral on the internet, on which Mr. Badu Kobi is seen wistfully calling out the name of Mama Gloria Kobi’s name and sneeringly snarling as follows, “Honey, once you pass on, you can bet your last pesewa that I will not have your place taken up by another Asante woman.” He did not use the neat and polished or polite words put in quotation marks in the preceding sentence. On the videoclip, Mr. Kobi actually chops the air disdainfully and snorts at the very notion of anybody’s deciding to marry any woman of Asante ethnic and cultural descent.

In other words, if anybody may be aptly deemed to be guilty of having inexcusably insulted another person or groups of persons, that individual is definitely Mr. Badu Kobi, and not the people who righteously responded to such haughty, uncouth and abusive use of language by Mr. Kobi with their own. It is also unpardonably preposterous for Mrs. Gloria Kobi to assume that, somehow, her husband is the very embodiment of Divine Providence, and that the mere fact of the latter presumption, perforce, authorizes the leader and founder of the Glorious Wave International Church to wantonly abuse both the members of his congregation who may be of Asante ethnicity and descent, while the rest of us non-clerical species of humanity are, literally speaking, trash who have absolutely no right, whatsoever, to give this morbid pretender and arrant buffoon our visceral views of our insufferably intemperate and idiotic species of humanity.

Of course, one cannot blame Mama Gloria Kobi who calls her husband “Daddy Cash,” which may very well have influenced or informed Mr. Kobi’s rather untutored decision to scandalously and indiscriminately light into the stereotypical character profile of the Asante woman as not being marriageable. Well, as I hinted earlier on in the previous column in this series, today, my Asante-woman-cuckolded cousin is a Roving Evangelist for one of the Ghanaian Pentecostal churches in the New England Region of the northeastern United States. I haven’t personally asked my cousin what kinds of sermons he preaches on his evangelical circuit. But, of course, one can almost be certain that such sermons are smack about the sort of emotionally and psychologically traumatizing experiences such as he endured from his abject maltreatment by his now back-again ex-prodigal wife.

For my own part, the last time that I came dangerously close to falling madly in love with an Asante woman, right here in New York City, my eldest sister – I have three of them – had to promptly and sternly warn me off the sort of infernal pit into which I was quixotically about to plunge myself. She, predictably, readily cited the emotionally and psychologically wrenching experience of our paternal cousin the evangelist. You see, Dear Reader, there are real and practically lived experiences that eerily and strikingly confirm the validity of some of these negative stereotypes; and then there are those stereotypes that are so practically far removed from our own personal experiences and daily routines and realities, that we tend to nonchalantly talk about them in our daily conversations with relatives, friends and acquaintances in much the same way that we retail jokes and fairy tales, the so-called Ananse Stories.

You see, Dear Reader, human nature is so protean and complex and unpredictable in nearly every one of its aspects that we do ourselves great disservice to either totally ignore some of these existentially nightmarish stories or render ourselves paralytic with some of the same. Ultimately, I think that what my paternal cousin’s story, for all these excruciating experiences are stories, points to the potentially therapeutic and redemptive on both sides of such narratives. You see, I am a primary model or subject of the foregoing narrative, at least a participant-narrator, so I cannot facilely presume to have all the details down pat. To every nightmarish existential narrative, however apocalyptically tragic, there are two sides, neither of which may necessarily be more morally righteous nor superior to the other.

*Visit my blog at: okoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 5, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]