SO ONLY 2.3 MI LLI ON GHANAIANS ARE ‘BONKERS’? SORRY I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU!

K1: KOO, I swear that when I observe many of the

goings-on in our country today, I begin to suffer from acute mental torture!

K2: Ho, you’re not the only one! I read an alarming report the other day claiming that 2.3 million Ghanaians have “psychological problems!”

• Ho, I don’t mean that type of psychological problem. Hey – wait a minute – how did they come by that rounded figure in the first place?

• I suppose they counted the number of people who have made their permanent abode  in markets and near gutters at the roadside all over Ghana?
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• Wait! Let’s Google what the man actually said… Ah here goes: ….
• QUOTE: ” Dr. Akwasi Osei, Chief Executive Officer of the Mental Health Authority has revealed that more that 2.3 million of Ghana’s population [are] suffering from various mental challenges….” He said the number of people “suffering from various psychological disorders constitutes approximately 10% of the country’s population…” UNQUOTE
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• One out of ten? I don’t believe it! I grew up in a town of about 10,000 people and can only remember two people
• who behaved strangely sometimes – not all the time, mind you!
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• The Mental Health Association has obviously got some figures from a sample survey and is extrapolating those figures onto a country-wide template.
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• Do you think they could have interviewed people like my favourite example of the not-so-psychologically-challenged-but-not-too-free- from-self-imposed-grandeur either?
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• Who could that be?
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• He used to hang around the Danquah Circle in Accra! He was the prize exhibit of posh expatriate ladies who were showing their visitors around Accra.
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• You don’t mean the “Danquah Dangler” ?
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• Yes! you know about him?
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• Yes! He used to expose his not inconsiderable manhood all day to the rich ladies trooping to shop for nice goodies at the posh supermarket on what’s now Oxford Street.
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• One cannot forget how he caused some men to suffer from inferiority complex! Especially when they drove past him with a lady sitting by them in the car!
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• Hahahahaha! The ladies, of course, pretended not to be looking but you knew all the time that they were stealing glances at him – and mentally making not-so-favourable comparisons!
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• Hahahahahahaha!
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• Ever wondered what happened to him?
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• Don’t know! But since his “station” was on the route to the Castle, he must have been bundled away through the intervention of some envious and outraged Governmental grandee?
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• Possible! Men who drove past with their women must have prayed that the women wouldn’t be fantasising about the Dangler at their most delicate and intimate moments!
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• Speak for yourself ! Man must not live by length alone!
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• Nor breadth either — for that matter! There are techniques that can reduce the relevance of size…
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• Ho? Go’way! Any man who is honest with himself would admit a certain amount of envy if he saw the Danquah Dangler in full “costume”….Penis  envy afflicts even women. How much more males?
  
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• But really can you imagine going the length and breadth of this country (pun intended) enumerating the Danquah Danglers of this world for research purposes?
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• Well can you accept that there are a whole 2.3 million of them?
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• Actually it doesn’t sound too far-fetched when you consider the current economic climate.
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• That’s precisely why it’s unbelievable. Where would Dr Osei’s Mental Health Association –which apparently receives very little funding from the Government – get the money to buy the vehicles – and petrol – needed, and also pay researchers to go round counting 2.3 million people? And not just count them, but be able, initially, to diagnose them as suffering from mental illness? I mean even people actually taken to mental hospitals are often difficult to diagnose! How do you differentiate, for instance, between people who are just a bit “soft” in the head and the proper “Messianic” types?
• Yes you do have a point. Where for instance do you place the “retarded” and the “autistic”? With expert help for such people with mere  learning difficulties, they can be taught how to live ordinary lives or even rich ones.
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• Yes – I once saw a TV programme about a young man who could look at whole city streets and reproduce them in their entirety, on paper, as fantastic works of art. Yet if he were born in these parts, he would probably have been written of from day one as an “obsessive” and/or ”disruptive” character, to be dumped on the heap of the 2.3 million “mad” people our country harbours.
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• Meanwhile, Dr Osei’s outfit is conspicuously failing to call attention to the huge sections of the population that are equally sick in the head but are not classified as such because their “mental illness” is of what might be called “a posh type.”
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• Whom do you mean?
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• I mean the thousands who live by the word of evangelists and prophets who by their words and deeds are quite clearly deranged and whose followers must therefore, of necessity, be also deranged. Can you imagine sane people flocking to police stations to demand the release of prophets whom the police have arrested because on good evidence  they have committed offences?
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• Come to that, can you imagine a prophet forecasting the outcome of an election that has not yet been held – and accusing a fellow priest of coming to Ghana to rig the said election? Or a sane prophet prophesying  the murder of a presidential candidate?
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• And can you imagine so-called journalists finding the stupid sayings of these priests to be “newsworthy” enough to be published as  headline news? And even though they are fully aware that  nothing the prophets say ever comes true?
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• The journalists trouble me greatly, I must confess! They must know that they are giving the “oxygen of publicity” to these quacks, who depend on publicity to collect huge sums, in the form of  tithes,  from their credulous   congregations? A man says things that can easily be found to be blasphemous from a cursory glance at the Bible, let alone a short discussion with a properly-trained theologian, and yet he’s given headlines because the journalists are too lazy to examine what’s said properly before publishing it!
• A “prophet” physically assaults a pregnant woman by stamping his foot hard on her belly,to rid   the foetus of witchcraft and yet the media fail to notice that – although a video of the incident goes viral?

• I think some of your fellow-journalists are themselves “mentally-challenged” for falling to spot and expose so many of these false prophets.
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• Well, as you have recognized, the prophets are funded heavily with tithes by their congregations, and you know that where there is treasure, many a man’s heart will be!
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• Ah? So you too can preach? You say then that  treasure has made the country go bonkers?
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• Yep. Not only the 2.3 million that the Mental Health Association has identified.
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• Yeah. I mean how else could one explain the people’s tolerance of galamsey, an enterprise that is killing the water-bodies that our own progeny are supposed to drink from in future?
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• Oyiwa! Bonkers!