Let’s provide a brief context here before touching on the national soccer team coach Akwasi Appiah’s unfortunate predicament.
In fact, careful and impassioned look at an average Ghanaian’s understanding of issues of the day is almost always explained in terms of “superstition, jealousy, status quo” or by using other misleadingly easy but complex socio-cultural concepts.
It is an energy-sapping marathon, needless to say a fool’s errand trying to assign any rationality to an average Ghanaian’s assessment of many events happening on daily basis in his or her life.
Sizable pack of Ghanaians primarily tends to interpret everything around them from the spectrum of their comfort zone.
Many Ghanaians are not interested in any development that defies the contours of the status quo.
For example, if the episode relates to (say) a fatal auto accident on the nation’s death-trap roads, the most likely reason behind the cause(s) of the calamity, according to Ghanaians’ worldview, is something connected to superstition.
In Ghanaian society, even relatively simple occurrences such as criticizing the conduct/performance of a particular public official or a soccer player’s subpar work rate is highly sensitive venture that is normally dismissed as an act caved out of enviousness or hatred.
Thus, the critic has to be “jealous” or “hater” of the person at the receiving end of the critique.
As I have stated on numerous of occasions in my commentaries, this dear country of my birth called Ghana has socio-cultural sickness.
We can either sit tight in denial and keep operating along the mediocre fringes as usual.
By: Bernard Asubonteng