Knee-Jerk Reaction

In a quintessentially knee-jerk reaction to my article entitled “Are Ghanaians In The Diaspora Not Bona Fide Ghanaians?” a compatriot who calls himself Kwabena Mframa, hallowed be his name, posted this sentence on the Ghanaweb:”Dzi wo fie asem na bra fie beboa oman nhehyee na moakye dodo wo akwantuo mu.Haba! To embellish his sentence, so to speak, he added “Kubolo”.

In all honesty, it needed a heroic suspension of disbelief to think that in this day and age, when man has been to the moon and the world has become a globalised village, there are Ghanaians who have the strange notion that once a fellow Ghanaian steps outside the confines of Ghana, he becomes a “Kobolo” which is the correct word and not “Kubolo” as the right honourable compatriot, who seems to be an expert in all things “Koboloistic”, puts it.


Frankly speaking, his use of the word “Kobolo” made me blink in wonderment. It is my bedrock belief that it is only a highly warped mind, to put it charitably, that will harbour the idea that no sooner does a Ghanaian leave the shores of his country than he acquires the status of a “Kobolo”, than he acquires all the chemical properties of a “Kobolo”!


I really wonder whether the right honourable writer has a notion of what “Kobolo” is.It is a Gã word which has found its way into almost all the Ghanaian languages. The plural is “Koboloi” and it means, inter alia, a vagrant, a person who has no home or job, someone who is good-for-nothing, namely someone who is lazy and has no skills, or a wanderer, someone who keeps moving from place to place with no permanent abode. In the olden days primary and middle school pupils who went to “Mangoline” instead of attending classes were branded as “Koboloi”


Can the right honourable writer put his hand on his heart and say that he does not have any friends or relatives living outside Ghana? If he does not have any friends or relatives living outside the shores of Mother Ghana, then he must be very different from the ordinary run of Ghanaians. If he has friends or relatives outside Mother Ghana, would he call them “Koboloi” for the mere fact that they live and work in other countries? Does that convert them into “Koboloi”?

As I have already intimated, this is nothing more, nothing less than a knee-jerk reaction to my article, i.e a comment made without any serious thought. I wish the writer would listen to my humble advice that we should learn to think before opening our mouth and not open our mouth without thinking and let all kinds of halitosis coated words come out like things coming out of a Pandora’s box. To write things like “Come Home And Pay Tax” shows that there are some Ghanaians who just take delight in showering vitriolic attacks on fellow countrymen; it seems every sentence read on the ghanaweb gives some people a carteblanche opportunity to launch chemically pure, vitriolic, ripsnorting attacks on compatriots. Sometimes I wonder why some Ghanaians make so much noise about “Kobolo, come home and pay tax”. Such Ghanaians should have the minimum economic acumen to know that the thousands, if not millions of dollars, pounds,D-Marks,French Francs,Yens,Canadian dollars, Spanish Pesetas, etc, sent to relatives in Ghana by Ghanaians living abroad would make any taxes they would have paid in Ghana pale into total insignificance.


It is worth noting that lots and lots of Ghanaians currently living and working outside worked for decades in Ghana as Architects, Translators, Conference Interpreters, Engineers, Professors of Languages, Medical officers, Nurses, midwives etc and paid tax to the kaleidoscope of governments Ghana has had the fortune or misfortune of having before being offered appointments in other parts of the world. I am pretty sure that Ghanaians who call Ghanaians outside “Koboloi” were not even born when those Ghanaians were paying tax to the various governments of Ghana; perhaps they were just starting to peck their way out of the shell of early childhood illusions. Ghanaians who call those living abroad “Koboloi” should know that the large majority of Ghanaians living abroad help the Ghanaian economy, in no small measure, through remittances.


If Kwabena Mframa’s definition of “Kobolo” is anything to go by, most of our great leaders like Kofi Annan,Kwame Nkrumah,Egyir Aggrey,Kofi Abrefa Busia,etc were all “Koboloi”What a warped mentality this is! It has been my hope for some time now that the passage of time would make Ghanaians, who are fond of gratuitously pouring insults on fellow Ghanaians—branding of fellow Ghanaians abroad as “Koboloi” is a case in point---realise the harmful effects of such attacks. I have to talk turkey and say that that hope can best be described now as forlorn. In fact, I am less sanguine now about such Ghanaians changing their attitude as far as showering of vitriolic attacks on fellow Ghanaians is concerned. It seems that pouring of insults on compatriots, gratuitously, has become fossilized; it has, indeed, become an abiding passion, it has become the standard billingsgate of some Ghanaians; these are compatriots who take delight in clinging, like leeches, to the ethos of insults and name-calling; these are Ghanaians prepared to let out as many insults as their lungs can contain. To hope that those Ghanaians who seem to have specialized in the art and chemistry of pouring insults on compatriots at the least opportunity would see reason and put a stop to their not so dignifying activities would be a fruitless intellectual exercise. Such a hope would, indeed, not only be a fatuous flight of the imagination, but also a highly unrewarding mental exercise and an invitation to extreme despair.


By Tete Cobblah