Mrs Charlotte Osei
Writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Genius recipient, made the following remarks as part of her TEDx talk (2013), “We Should All Be Feminists” (see her book of the same title, a title which is also “required reading” for 16-year-old Swedish girls):
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man.
“Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support, but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same?
“We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
The producers and writers of Beyonce’s “Flawless” sampled Chimamanda’s “We Should All Be Feminists.”
Having brought up Chimamanda and this interesting subject matter on feminism, we will not expatiate upon the social, political and philosophical structure of this presentation except to entreat our readership to locate the text and read it themselves, if it has not already done so.
Latest news
It has recently come to light that some women groups in Ghana have a wonderful plan in the works, namely to stage a public protest against Kennedy Agyapong, New Patriotic Party (NPP)’s Member of Parliament for Assin North and a ranking member on the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications, for his demeaning and controversial sex-for-role exchange allegation he made against Madam Charlotte Osei, Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC).
In our opinion, this positive action is long overdue! We still hope this news is not another canard!
Regardless, it bedevils the mind to even imagine how a worm of deceitfulness like Kennedy Agyapong, a political loose cannon, can become a legislator, let alone address himself to the title “honorable” and qualify as a ranking member on the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communications! What are all these negative idiosyncrasies in our political culture about?
Certainly, there is something terribly wrong with Nkrumah’s Ghana. As a matter of fact, the country and its beautiful people need to drink jolts of moral catharsis from a soul-searching chalice.
But thanks to the political conscientization of a large segment of the Ghanaian public, particularly women, consciousness about issues of social justice, gender equality and equity, and moral psychology seems to be on the increase. This is a healthy trend for the moral mechanism of gender relations, for, if for anything at all, in theory at least, it demonstrates a great potential to shift the balance of power dynamics in that unequal dichotomy a little bit toward the women’s side.
However against a backcloth of popular knowledge of Ken’s loaded misogynistic dossier kept in the open across the nation, it is only proper that all progressive citizens of goodwill endorse the collective decision of these women groups to protest his scandalous allegations against Madam Osei, even if they are to force him to apologize.
Our view is that a heavy price of moral conviction must always accompany an instantiation of any sincere apology, thus it must not be subjected to coercion.
It must, therefore, flow uninhibitedly from the natural reserves of one’s self-conviction and conscionable repertoire of progressive personal ethos.
Alas, stupidity and arrogance and overrated personal worth and moral-intellectual diminution can and do seriously stymie personal investment in moral intelligence and intellectual growth.
The fact is also that while this path to the restitutive normalization of gender relations is more than called for in the Ghanaian body politic, it is also incumbent upon the Ghanaian society and its citizens to ensure that the floodgates of public emotion do not be opened wide such that they lead to the flooding and choking of the rational sense and of our collective sense of judicial moralism.
It also means that we must not rush to judgment by forcing Ken to publicly apologize when he has yet to adduce his supporting evidential bombshell. This contention does not, in and of itself, imply our support for him…far from it. Left to us he should not be in parliament. As a matter of fact his presence there demeans and soils what should otherwise have been an august house.
Madam Charlotte deserves a fair hearing in both the court of public opinion and a competent jurisdiction. This view contends that Ken must unleash the juggernaut of his forensic evidence on any competent jurisdiction that is ready to hear the case Madam Osei brings against him.
Let us also not forget that beyond Ken’s bombastic allegation which he has yet to adduce any evidence for, Nana Obiri Boahen, another foul-mouthed philistine in the opposition NPP, also says the following of Madam Osei:
“I prefer to trust a prostitute who is carrying her trade in the night than the EC of today.”
“In other words Madam Osei is worse than a night prostitute!” Nana Obiri Boahen seems to imply!...
But, it is also quite possible that Nana Obiri Boahen may not have known that Madam Osei is Kennedy’s own Afia Schwarzenegger, his own mother…All these tabloid publicities for what?
During his infamous public feud with Afia for instance, Kennedy reportedly called her a prostitute and she, in turn, fired back calling his mother a prostitute…Afia reportedly also called Kennedy a pedophile…anti-netiquette Kennedy reportedly threatened to flood the public domain with her nude pictures for her standing up to him…a shameless male-chauvinist bleating he-goat…
Kennedy Agyapong, his absolute abuse of public office, decency and diplomacy…sickening…a questionable behavior that not even the critical methodology of the sociological perspective, the sociology of knowledge and the sociological imagination can sufficiently account for…
Then his friend…then his colleague Nana Obiri Boahen…a Shakespearean fustilarian…an unsightly mannequin, a living dead pumpkin…mounts his [Kennedy’s] soiled stage and pretends to give us an echoic reminder of the latter’s rhetorical bowel movement and comic buffoonery…
Then again, is Nana Obiri Boahen also indirectly saying that he will even trust his prostituting mother, sister, niece, daughter-in-law, grandmother, sister-in-law, daughter and wife, and all those females in the opposition NPP who are carrying their trade in the night than Madam Osei?
Are all our politicians, male and female alike, not night prostitutes? So, what is Nana Obiri Boahen saying, if we should ask again and again? What is it about this beautiful and intelligent woman that irks repulsively ugly men such as Kennedy Agyapong and Nana Obiri Boahen?
Could it be inferiority complex?
Could it be that Nana Obiri Boahen is a male prostitute, himself, a man whose internal psychology is infested with moral infections acquired from ingesting the intellectual rot of chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhea?
Nana Obiri Boahen and his out-of-the-ordinary Couvade Syndrome…his eerie sympathetic pregnancy…
Could it be that Madam Charlotte Osei is more beautiful than the wives of Kennedy Agyapong and Nana Obiri Boahen?
Could Madam Osei’s beauty and intelligence have been why the NPP wrote her secret “love letters”?
Nana Obiri Boahen…a wooden, stiffened version of a grimaced bald Idi Amin statue and taxidermy…
Kennedy Agyapong…a grotesque-caricature version of a smiling, confused and disheveled corpse…
These are two dead comic characters who are infatuated with the gracious Black Mona Lisa, Madam Charlotte Osei…
Two intellectually and morally dead men whose political portraits strongly take after President Mahama’s “Dead Goat Syndrome”…
Thus, for us to appreciate the full story we must also somehow follow the logical arguments Chimamanda advanced in her TED.com talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” to know that Ken cannot make his case with only one side of the story without convincing evidence.
A tree hardly can stand tall without the active support of its roots. Ken, it appears, has not learnt this basic fact about life. He somehow thinks he can grow taller than the hair of his Zika-infested head!
He must therefore tell both sides of the story and then allow Madam Osei to defend herself, for intelligent and serious and conscionable characters, namely men and women of character, do not make outrageous allegations, allow them to hang in the air unattended and expect the general public to assume evidence for them.
Such is not how we should our democracy and institutions to grow. We forget that a possibly unjustifiable attack (s) on public figures is a direct attack on our institutions and democracy, even if the latter is sham and nonexistent. The rotten tongues of public figures such as those of Ken are antithetical to the character of “liberal” democracy.
Here is what Queen Mother Nana Akosua Gyanfiaba has to say:
“We’ve had discussions and the queen mothers are not happy so we would come together and let the whole nation know that as queen mothers who represent our communities we are not happy because we have women under us, we have our mothers, we have our sisters, we have our daughters that we need to protect them, such comments are unhealthy, it doesn’t bring unity…
“It is rather unfortunate that such a statement could come from no less a person than a honourable MP who stands for a constituency where women both vulnerable and elite, less privileged and sort of people voted for him, because it is a woman who gave birth for him.”
Now, let us hear what the Secretary for National Zongo Magajia Association, Hon. Hajia Alima M. Issah, also has to say:
“We want to make it clear that to the world that women are not sex objects and therefore no one has the right to insult women for any reason because of their own interest…We therefore call on the Speaker of Parliament, leaders of his political party, the National Patriotic Party (NPP) and women his family to call him to order.”
CONCLUSION
Of course, it is arguably the male ego that produces confrontational feminism. But whether male chauvinism is rooted in biology or genetics, environment or culture, or a combination of all three variables, is a very complex question we shall not take up in the dark pages of this two-part text.
Already some scientists are speculating that the male gene is on the verge of extinction, dying out. What is interesting about one indispensable aspect of this complex question is the fact that, we see animals demonstrating an “aggressive” social instantiation of the male ego, an unconscientious he-goat, in the animal kingdom, too.
Even the name “kingdom” says it all…not “queendom.” Queendom is an island where eusocial he-goat politicians such as Kennedy Agyapong, Halidu Haruna, Nana Obiri Boahen live…Rapper Queen B Lil’ Kim is an Amazon-king who rules over this claustrophobic asylum.
Ask Kennedy Agyapong his favorite gospel track and he will almost certainly mention Lil’ Kim’s “Don’t Fuck With Queen Bee”!
Ask Halidu Haruna and Nana Obiri Boahen their favorite national and they will almost certainly mention “Queen Bitch”!
All three unconscientious he-goat politicians are Queen Bitch! Something, of course, must have gone terribly wrong during the developmental psychology of these he-goat politicians that is extremely difficult to place…
These three men are the “brand new second hand gal” that truth-teller Peter Tosh sang about on the track “Brand New Second Hand”:
“You’re only acting like you are somebody…
“You’re only a show off, your painted face…
“But underneath that face you’re just a disgrace…
“You think it’s the dress you wear that make you a lady…
“Get that out of your mind gal…
“You must be crazy…
“Mama used to tell me long ago, not everything you see glitter is gold…
“Take man fe idiot…you’re wicked…
“Fool ya, you fool ya…
We shall return with the concluding installment, Part 2!
REFERENCES
Ghanaweb. “I Trust A Prostitute Over EC…Obiri Boahen.” July 7, 2016.
The Enquirer. “Queen Mothers To Protest Ken Agyapong’s Comment On EC boss.” Courtesy of Ghanaweb. July 11, 2016.
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