Ghana Is Only A "Paradise" By African Standards, Mr. Ayariga!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 15, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

I don't care what Mr. Mahama Ayariga thinks of morning radio talk-show hosts in Ghana, and Ghanaian journalists in general. What I care about most is his insufferable and wanton abuse of media operatives in the country, on the rather fatuous presumption that, somehow, foreigners visiting the country have a better and far more credible perspective on the real state of the country's economy and the general quality of life of the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens. Let Mr. Ayariga also try singing his cynical tune to the directors of the IMF-World, as his own boss, President John Dramani Mahama, desperately tries to convince the Bretton-Wood establishment that his country is worth bailing out of its dire economic straits for the fourth time in barely three decades.

Anyway, for those of you who are just "tuning in" or "reading up" and may not be familiar with his name, Mr. Mahama Ayariga is the Sports Minister of the Mahama-led government of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). "Just tune in to radio stations every morning, and you'd think Ghana has stopped functioning. Every morning [radio talk-show hosts] kill the spirit of the people, kill the confidence of the people, by creating an atmosphere of hopelessness; yet when you step outside the shores of Ghana and step into other countries, they think Ghana is a paradise because they come here and they see the difference between Ghana and their countries," Mr. Ayariga is reported to have told the host of a talk-radio program recently (See "Ghana Is 'Paradise' To Outsiders - Ayariga" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/15/15).

Now, there is something seriously wrong with the psyche or mindset of any Ghanaian citizen who firmly and sincerely believes that Ghanaians have to gauge their standard and quality of living by what transient tourists to the country think about the same; or more aptly, what these largely polite and nauseatingly patronizing foreigners publicly and charitably express to naive and patently out-of-touch Ghanaians like Mr. Ayariga. Now, let me regale the dear reader with a story about my quite fraught if also worthwhile encounter with an elderly white-American colleague from one of the Deep-Southern States of the United States. As of this writing, I have been sharing my office suite with Gorman Bullshitsky (not his real name) for more than a decade.

When we first met - he was already on the college's faculty - Gorman was all rapturous about his two-year's worth of experiences in Ghana of the late 1970s, while writing his dissertation on some aspect of postcolonial African literature and teaching in some nondescript capacity at the University of Cape Coast. He had been tugged along into the country by the late Prof. Kofi Awoonor, whom Gorman claimed to have rudely abandoned him as soon as the former "titular chairman" of the Comparative Literature Program (those were his own words) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (or SUNY Stony Brook) secured a deanship at Cape Vars. He would promptly announce to Gorman that henceforth, an official distance needed to be created between the two men.

The liberal white-American doctoral-degree candidate had traveled to Ghana with "Elder Brother" Kofi Nyidevu, in order to have the latter supervise his dissertation research and writing. He would end up soliciting the unexpectedly generous assistance of Prof. Amiri Imamu Baraka, the recently deceased vanguard African-American poet, playwright and erudite scholar-historian of African-American musicology. There are other aspects of Gorman's Ghanaian experiences that I am reserving for future discursive use.

What I have been really trying to get at here is that once Gorman became a little more comfortable and familiar with me, he also became more brutally frank with me about his real feelings and true opinions vis-a-vis his two-year's worth of experiences in Ghana. One thing he hasn't forgiven Ghanaians for, even more than three decades later, is the fact of the country's being supposedly so boondocky that Gorman had to travel to either Lome, Togo, or Abidjan, the Ivorian capital, in order to be served a decent meal in a modern restaurant. Once he became comfortable enough with me, Gorman would routinely preface any references he made in relation to Ghana with such rhetorically condescending phraseology as "By Ghanaian standards" or "By African standards," as in, for example, "By Ghanaian and African standards, Kofi Awoonor's novel This Earth, My Brother is a classic."

In other words, what the breed and/or brand of foreigners whom Mr. Ayariga claims to routinely encounter, and who purportedly perceive the country to be a "veritable paradise," have been too courteous and polite to let on to their Ghanaian host is the inescapable fact that "Ghana is only a paradise by African standards." And if he were half as savvy as his Harvard Law School graduate diploma claims him to be, Mr. Ayariga would readily and wistfully latch onto the fact that an African standard, or equivalent, of paradise is nothing worth dissertating about.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is the author of "Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana" (iUniverse.com 2005).
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