A Critical Take On Nelson Abudu Baani's Sharia Talk

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

Nov. 16, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

His inalienable democratic right to free speech and all, still, I was about to call for his summary expulsion from the august chamber of Ghana's National Assembly. My initial reaction was, of course, wholly based on the blistering reaction of his critics. The National Democratic Congress' Member of Parliament had not, in reality, called for the legally sanctioned stoning of married women caught in the culturally and socially disdained act of adultery, that is, if one reads underneath the kind of thinking that informs the espousal of such patently uncivilized attitude towards the otherwise morally righteous Intestate Inheritance/Succession Bill.

Mr. Nelson Abudu Baani - nobody has of yet commented on the deft combination of the Western, Islamic and Indigenous African roots of his name - had only passionately implied that the recently re-drafted Intestate Bill, soon to be passed and signed into law, needs to be critically re-examined. It was the rather radical and chauvinistic thrust of his argument that was incontrovertibly faulty, because it also suggested that married women who have been found to have "desecrated" their marital beds have absolutely no right to inherit the property of the men they have been forensically proven to have cuckolded up the deaths of these husbands. To the best of my knowledge, none of the media reports on the "Baanigate" mentions the fact of whether at the time of their deaths, the cuckolded husbands were still officially married to their unfaithful wives or not. The latter is a very significant factor of the entire equation of the Intestate Inheritance/Succession Bill. In other words, what business of Mr. Baani's is it, whether or not a husband decides to continue living with his allegedly unfaithful wife or concubine?

The Afghan connection, it well appears, had been trotted into his argument in order to demonstrate that the more liberal and enlightened Ghanaian view of a conjugally errant woman's right to inherit the property of the man she has been accused, or even forensically proven, to have flagrantly dishonored is so lax that it actually encourages such grossly unethical behavior. Now, that is obviously a stretch and a far cry from suggesting that women caught in situations of adultery in Ghana ought to be treated the way their fellow women are treated in the Sharia-oriented cultures of the Islamic world. To be certain, Mr. Baani's example need not have gone any farther than northern Nigeria, Ghana's own West-African neighborhood.

Where the Daboya/Makarigu NDC-MP erred was not to have been ratiocinatively balanced and fair-minded enough to have also reversed roles for the two main genders. In other words, how about cases where the female main breadwinner - or proverbial pants-wearer - dies and leaves most of her wealth or property for the inheritance of a husband who had also cheated on her with other women and out of which adulterous affairs or relationships, in several cases (as is known to be quite common in our kind of society and culture), had resulted in the births of several conjugally illegitimate children?

In short, the major defect with the current Intestate Bill being debated in parliament inheres in the traditionally sexist presumption that, somehow, it is always the male spouse in a marriage who possesses wealth or property to be inherited. Of course, among the majority ethnic Akan people of Ghana, the reverse is just as often true as the traditionally male-centered way of looking at the same.

Mr. Nelson Abudu Baani seems to be vindictively concerned about the certain possibility of the Intestate-Inheritance Law benefitting women whom he sarcastically and chauvinistically dubs as "Alomo Gyata." The latter reference, of course, is to self-willed and self-motivated and independent-minded women who refuse to docilely toe the line, as dictated by powerful and self-centered men in society. This is where the salient thrust of the debate and criticism ought to be focused.

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