A Piece O’ My Mind: It wasn’t your money

My Technical Skills teacher in Junior Secondary School, many years ago, was also the one who taught us Cultural Studies at some point when there was no one with the right competence to handle the subject.

The man didn’t make me enjoy Technical Drawing classes. The highest score I made in that subject was six out of ten, and that happened only once. For the rest of the time, it was always three out of ten. Always. That, I’d never forget. But I also remember him for something he had said in one of our Cultural Studies lessons.

He said, “poverty is hard, but debt is horrible”

It took me many years to make sense of that statement. If you are poor, it’s a terrible thing. Max Romeo, in his reggae piece, ‘Uptown Babies’, says poverty is a sin. He was speaking of life in the ghetto where survival is a matter. He said uptown babies don’t cry because they don’t know what hunger is like. He was right. Let me add that uptown babies don’t have time to differentiate between what is ‘class’ and what isn’t.

This past weekend, The Ghana Social Media Security Force (GSMSF), has been up in arms, literally. What have they been looking for? We don’t even know. But we figured there were two regiments.

Regiment One was happy about (or were they?) the marriage ceremony of the son of Kwame Despite. The quantum of opulence on display, oh,’ it resembles your eyes.’ A very expensive fleet of cars, got everyone talking.

Then there was Regiment Two, who must find something to say, by all means, to discredit the ceremony. What did they find? They found out that the ceremony had “no class”. And whatever in Pete’s name that means, that one too, we don’t know and we don’t care.

But there’s something we care about; the shifting goalposts for how people spend their monies in this town. In this ‘national marriage’ ceremony, people who loved the show of opulence said, it was ok for the owners of the money to spend it wherever they liked and on whatever they chose to. Nobody has a right to question their use of their own money. They are right, I agree.

So it came to pass, sometime in the past, that these same people who are now pontificating the right to the usage of one’s wealth on whatever they liked, had been on these same streets, shouting themselves hoarse, over what a certain group of citizens chose to use their monies for. Those citizens used their monies to ‘sow seeds’, in a church programme. And the GSMSF went ballistic. They said they won’t understand. They insulted them, vilified them, called them fools, for choosing to give their own monies to men of God.

So this is the thing; it is your money, you can choose to lavish it on a wedding. No problems. But we have problems when you choose to put the same money on the altar for the kingdom business. That one, we have problems with it paaa! So what at all do we want? We don’t know. What at all is the problem? That one too, we don’t know. One thing we do know, for sure; this one too shall come to pass.

Efo Jehoshaphat

Hatɔgodo