By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 7, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
Perhaps the greatest benefit that came out of Ghana's participation in the 2014 Brazil World Cup Tournament, was the granting of asylum to some 200-plus Ghanaian soccer fans who had been flown to Brasilia to cheer up their country's senior national soccer team, the Black Stars. After the latter team was eliminated in the very first round, or group stage, of the tournament, the fans decided that returning home to Ghana was the least intelligent thing to do.
Before their trip, not many of these fans were gainfully employed, and so for them gauging by the palpable relative prosperity of the host nation for the World Cup, compared to their own, it simply did not make good sense for these soccer fans to prioritize the purely ideological and sentimental abstraction that is patriotism over and above the imperative need for self-preservation.
As in all such desperate circumstances, one smart cookie among the group decided to come up with a quite interesting idea that s/he thought might resonate with the Brazilian immigration authorities. They would cook up a story that reflected their sentiments about their home country more than the objective truth of practical realities. It was not exactly what one might classically term as a whole fabric of mendacity; for when all has been said and done, sentiments are actually based on reality; and reality, of course, is the veritable stuff of which truth, as most cultures know it, is made.
Well, that asylum-seeking subterfuge, or pretext, was that the Ghana of mid-2014 was in the throes of a virulent religious conflict of apocalyptic proportions. The problem, though, was that the equations that made up the mathematical soundness of the story did not add up at precisely the points where they mattered most. The fact of the matter was that the Ghana of 2014 had not experienced any religious conflict whatsoever, and was highly unlikely to know one in the offing. And to be certain, since time immemorial, the country had not known any religious conflicts, especially one that involved Christians and Muslims tearing at each other's throats the way one, for instance, found in Nigeria from time to time.
If anything at all, Ghana has always been known to be the one sacred spot on Earth where Christians and Muslims have always cohabited with the organic amicability of identical twins. Which may very well be the reason why President Dilma Rousseff decided to grant a generous year's asylum to these most "patriotic" of Ghanaian citizens. You see, there is this old adage which says that desperate situations call for desperate measures.
In this particular instance, desperation for a better quality of life compelled these asylees to concoct a comically desperate motive for their direly desired end. Of course, it must have come as a much needed comic relief, especially coming in the wake of Germany's unprecedented 7-1 trouncing of the host country for the 2014 World Cup. It also condignly exposed the Mahama regime for the proverbial house of cards which it scandalously represented. And on this score, of course, I am referring to the inexcusably invidious decision by the latter government to almost exclusively fly out soccer fans whom it publicly claimed to have literally earned their keep by being strictly identified as card-carrying members and fanatical supporters of the ruling National Democratic Congress.
In other words, these asylum seekers were selected and flown, gratis, to Brazil on the basis, and premise, of their impregnable patriotism. And the litmus test for such patriotism entailed their individually and collectively blind loyalty to the ruling party, the so-called National Democratic Congress. In this sense, therefore, the key operatives of the NDC, like the key operatives of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP) of yesteryear, came to envisage the NDC as one and the same as the august Republic of Ghana.
In their warped imagination, the NDC was Ghana and Ghana was the NDC. And so, of course, when the 200-plus NDC vanguard patriots decided to privilege their economic well-being over and above the ideological and sentimental abstraction that is patriotism, the Mahama posse could only have gone into shock of the sort that it typically associated with suspended animation.
In calling on the Rousseff government to repatriate these first-class NDC patriots turned fugitives overnight, the Mahama government must have been desperately attempting to recoup some of its lost credibility and respect among the global comity of nations. But then, what is the value of "credibility" and "respect" in the face of raw hunger and abject deprivation? Which pretty much explains why most of these asylees had reportedly decided to take up jobs in industry and building and road construction. Brazil is, of course, globally renowned as one of the few upper-middle-income countries with an unusually high rates of employment.
I also don't suppose that the sponsors of these asylees expected the latter to make a first employment choice of vacuously bingeing on patriotism. And, of course, 66-year-old President Dilma Rousseff appreciated this much better than her 56-year-old Ghanaian counterpart. You see, ten years of extra-existential experience makes a whole world of a difference.
Thank you, Dilma. And may God bless the Federal Republic of Brazil! And to my new Ghanaian-Brazilian relatives, be on your best behavior.
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