Our $50,000 Car-Loan Parliamentarians “Tie” Us To Cultural Junk

*By Akadu Ntiriwa Mensema Ph. D.; Post-Grad. Dipl.

“Failure by Sene MP [Member of Parliament] to put on his tie on Thursday
meant he was improperly dressed and could not present the budget estimates
for the Information Ministry” (Ghanaweb Dec 18, 2009).

Our viral genealogies of Parliamentarians
Who push us in contradictory directions
And implant us in Petri-dishes of anomy
The $50,000 car-loan economic saboteurs
Agents of self-fulfilling cultural defeatism
Dabble in neocolonized cultural genocide
In that a tie-less MP was silenced in Parliament
The august body of clueless Parliamentarians
Mirrors what is wrong with our untidy body politic
We have become thirsty acculturated d nomads
We squirm in our homes looking for our sanity
We are the agents of cultural self-derailment
Led by our clueless stomach-Parliamentarians
Who put on ties and tie us to neo/colonialisms
Who put the colonial tie around our weak necks
To commit adulterated acculturated suicides
To promote mass acculturated cultural genocide

The senile cultural nomads in our Parliament
The eternally bankrupt intellectual elites
Who only think about tractors and car loans
Every four years after suffocating us with ties
By tying ties around our national sagging necks
Their ties that are emblazoned with foreign flags
Flags of America, Britain, France, China, etc.
The half-baked educated thievery gangly elites
Who think wearing a tie is a signifier of progress
That a tie is synonymous with whites’ work ethic
Who think a tie is the real deal in a Parliament

We embrace antiquated foreign values
Imparted to us in the slavery/colonial era
But reject Ghanaian ontological values
Without asking revolutionary questions
Folks Westerners do not use our costumes
Our car-loan parliamentarians don’t know
That Westerners don’t use our local names
They do not follow our African religions
They don’t eat our local staple food
They mock at our cottage industries
Yet our leaders like to wear woolen suits
In the hot murderous drenching sun
With ties around their stately necks

Their ties are a signifier of stolen wealth
Social mobility based on elite thievery
A generation of Africans is lost forever
A generation of Ghanaians lost forever
We believe that foreign things are better
We worship any foreign thing/idea
The white man is our god and is godly
The white man’s second-hand tie/socks
The white woman’s second-hand panties
Are our heavenly cherished designer items
Better than new made-in-Ghana goods
Cultural nomads who lack the ability to think
But have patented stealing and thievery
Stewed in neocolonial depraved mentalities
They believe in yesteryear nursery dogmas:
Our dogma of eternal white superiority
Reflect the weight of our traumatic histories



**Akadu N. Mensema is a nationalist Denkyira beauty. She is a trained
oral historian cum sociologist and Professor in the USA. She lives
in Pennsylvania with her great mentor and teaches Africa-area studies
at a college in Maryland. She writes what critics have called “populist
hyperbolic, satirical” poetry. She can be reached at [email protected]