Football, Another Opium

Religion is the opium that sends the masses to sleep over their domination by the powerful, says Karl Marx.

To be liberated, the masses would have to be awakened out of their opium slumber. This was the teaching in yesteryears.

Today, I see football surpassing the opium effect of sleeping over troubles. It is more than another opium because it drugs more than the masses. It sends both masses and non-masses: nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie and proletariat, and sometimes even the fourth estate of the realm, into stupor.

Otherwise it would not happen that sitting in my living room turned into mosquito fodder by darkness mitigated only by candlelight, I would be disturbed by shouts of go-o-o-al! The noise wouldn't stop even as I dozed off lying on the bed. I would keep hearing more shouts and cheers of go-o-o-o-al!

Always seeking soother weapons for diverting public attention from channelling public funds into their pockets, congresspeople are constantly working out plans to use football as cover-up for their chopping deeds. They operate so well that even when everywhere is dum, they would find light for football. It doesn't matter that schoolchildren have no light for their homework; the masses and non-masses would still be cheering over football.

Heretofore, we classmates, school mates, university mates, hall mates and anti-Acheampong mates were Marxist fans. Among us were today's thieving congress regime elements. Today, they are unashamedly a homeowners and developers club who pluck their funds from the motherland state. Ironically, they taunt and scoff others as property-owning.

Formerly assumed Nkrumahist-Marxist followers, congress politicians are now extreme neo-liberalist politicians of nouveau thievery. They constantly raid the lower, middle and upper classes.

I never appeared to understand why some women hate sports, football included. Watching husbands (sometimes with their invited friends) screaming over kicks of that leather object while they laboured in the kitchen or somewhere else in the house ought to make them hate football.

These days, though, there are many liberated women and many career women. Some have hired chore helpers or they manage to get husbands 'co-choring' with them. So many of them now chant gooooooal by themselves or along husbees/others.

Severally, football is more intoxicating than opium. Like all intoxicating substances, it has cynical positive side. It is somehow a stress manager. The question is whether we should be labouring at managing stress or liberating ourselves from it.

Congress prefers the former to the latter because they live by compulsive thieving. In thieving, having gobbled up all the resources that must be used to prevent us from being stressed, they leave the rest of us stressed out. And so they love to use football as a stress palliative measure.

I am what anti-football women used to be. I detest congress using football to divert dumsÉ” oppression; they using football as opium to soothe a dum darkness wound. Football sends everyone sleeping over rapturous issues; over government preferring to ignore matters of improved living conditions and especially ample electricity supply.

Congress had hoped for an AFCON ayariwin which would have left compatriots intoxicated enough to forget dumsÉ”. Well, they have an ayariloss. They had hoped an ayariwin would have covered up the woes of dumsÉ”. The intoxication has not happened.

The dormant player greed instinct was triggered by greedy congresspeople whose personal interest supersedes player interest. Otherwise a patriotic selfless congress leadership would have persuaded players to donate their bonuses to a cause such as supplying generators to final year high school students.

Surely, the players are conscious of the dire economic situation at home. It takes more than congress to raise that consciousness. Instead, congress of thieves chose to trick players into believing you can strike to force airlifting of dollars and still be patriotic. That falsehood has reduced the presumably innocent player, to still wonder why he cannot chop when there is no light for students to prepare for their examinations.

However, those who knowingly or unknowingly compromised over humiliating the motherland and insulted us when we complained should have known that's not how to win a tournament. You would weep for whatever when my caring compatriots weep not for the dumsÉ” apostles. If you choose to weep for congress the weeping shall be ayarilossly uncontrollable and inconsolable.

Ayaripeople must stay away from 2017 AFCON hosting. I pray that there would be no ayarilying thieves in 2017. Their disappearance should enable our hosting AFCON to glory in 2019. For glory even before 2019, let there be a win in 2017 for as long as the thieves would have vamoosed by then.

You don't win a match against me, even with biased refereeing, when I have supplied electricity for your people to watch the match. You could bribe me by losing the match.

By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh