Brother Bellyfool

This is 2011 and
certainly you must have more than enough to eat.
You did not have to go into the bush with comrades
to launch a guerilla war(fare)
to pour much blood in sacrifice for freedom.

Independence in 1957 was a struggle
but you did not have to suffer the long drawn tortures
as apartheid happened in the South.

You’ve had your own share of shocks in self-government;
a coup or two here
but nothing as the consuming fire of Biafra
nor the long years of war across the sharia divide in the Sudan.

Nothing as compared to the slaughter in Liberia
nor the limbs hacked off in Sierra Leone
in raw sadists’ fashions of short and long sleeves;
certainly nothing that measures up to the genocide in Rwanda

you have even experienced some days of hunger
but nothing compared to the years of famine
and gun battle in Mogadishu.

Indeed, Brother Bellyfool,
you have been okay; getting on by just fine;
drinking akpeteshie and eating fufu and tickling yourself;
playing highlife and singing in narrow proverbs and
dancing your worries into the Atlantic.

So I can understand you, my Brother Bellyfool!
I can understand you when you escape the gravity
of the manholes in your next to non-existent roads,
when pregnant women have to trek miles after miles in labour,
when harvested food goes rotten on farms for lack of transportation,
when 50% of your children cannot pass simple junior school exams,
when common malaria is still a major killer of your people.

And yet you decide instead to spend your time and energy
talking about gays and supi-supi;
men who do men and
women who do women and
men who do women in the behind

Brother Bellyfool,
you are not a worried man at all!
--

*dedicated to Ghanaians from me a non-national*