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12.10.2019 Feature Article

“Oso” Is as Ghanaian as Albinism

Oso Is as Ghanaian as Albinism
12.10.2019 LISTEN

Anybody, girl or boy, man or woman, who attended boarding schools in the country, especially middle and secondary boarding schools, is fully aware of the active practice of homosexuality in these institutions and, in effect, the country at large. So this rather lame-brained “let’s pretend” attempt to deny more healthily, intelligently and constructively packaged knowledge of human sexuality to our children and grandchildren, especially the practices and the reasons – both scientific and cultural – behind LGBTQI sexuality, in addition to the established and officially sanctioned culture of heterosexuality, is just that, inexcusably lame-brained. In short, the scrapping of the proposed Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) by the Government, largely to preempt opposition propaganda in the runup to the 2020 Presidential Election, has made Ghana a laughing stock like the rest of the morally and culturally bankrupt and technologically underdeveloped countries around the world, largely the so-called Third-World countries.

We have trodden this path before, so I would not waste the Dear Reader’s precious time in challenging the relevance, both moral and intellectual, of Mr. Moses Foh-Amoaning’s allegation that Prof. Stephen Adei, the former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), was fired from his post as United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Representative for Southern Africa because Prof. Adei had dared to question some of the liberal policies of the world body vis-à-vis LGBTQI sexuality or culture. At the end of the day, what is far more significant and pertinent to point out here is the fact that as a country and a culture, Ghana has not fared any better with or without the introduction and the teaching of LGBTQI culture or the social and legal acceptance of the same. Put in simple words, Ghanaians and our politicians and our traditional rulers and parents and guardians have far more pressing problems and concerns worthy of our attention than obsessing over the legal acceptance whether LGBTQI culture stands to become the bane of our sociocultural integrity.

The fact of the matter is that Ghana, as it is presently, can scarcely degenerate into any worse society or culture than it is already. To be certain, we are the worse for the ethno-political genocide precipitated by two decades of the inescapably fascist Rawlings-Tsikata Revolution, so-called, than any morally and culturally regressive impurities that may be attributable to the kinds of moral and social blights or cankers that may even be objectively or fairly attributable to homosexuality or gay culture, the most common descriptors that are often associated with moral and cultural degeneration in the imagination of the average Ghanaian. You see, the average Ghanaian is rather too parochially and psychologically conservative for his or her own good. One would ordinarily have thought that the global explosion of technology by the LGBTQI-accepting or tolerant cultures and civilizations around the globe, would have opened the scale-covered eyes of Ghanaian leaders to the imperative need to recognizing the glaring fact that the strength and genius, as well as the greatness, of our country inescapably inheres in the imperative need to allowing each and every Ghanaian citizen the inalienable right to fully express themselves as humans, irrespective of whether we personally or even officially approve of the lifestyle of any particular individual or cultural group or groups.

You see, even as “Prophet” Badu Kobi, the leader-founder of the Glorious Wave Church International, recently attested, albeit controversially, there may be cultures and ethnic groups that each and every one of us may not be particularly fond of but, nevertheless, which, we, perforce, need to fully recognize the fact that the vintage products of these very detested cultures and polities have, each and every one of them, the inalienable fundamental right to exist and be able to creatively express themselves, as long as their right to exist and function does not negatively impact the right to peaceful coexistence of all the various ethnic polities and cultures that make up the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 8, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]

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