Chopmoney wahala!

Chopmoney should be dished out with extreme care

In some homes, money is no prob­lem. As Kwame Korkorti would put it, money is not a small boy! That is when money flows like the Rivers of Babylon and chopmoney is no problem at all.

Anyone who wants cash goes to Daddy’s drawer and collects a hand­ful. It is an offence to account for any money you take, for the simple reason that to account for monies taken from Daddy’s drawer would be seen as undermining Daddy’s credibility as someone who is filthy rich. Standards must be maintained. Everyone must feel free to spend.

It is the responsibility of someone to always make sure that the drawer is filled to capacity. Such a person fac­es severe sanctions if Madam comes to pick up the day’s chop money and finds the drawer only half-full.

SABOTAGE

It would be regarded as sabotage of the highest order. The person is likely to be charged with the domes­tic version of treasonable felony. The punishment is that the person’s daily pocket money of ¢300,000 will be reduced by a quarter.

Madam goes to shop with a househ­elp who is perpetually excited. She sees new things everyday, eats new varieties of baked beans and corn­flakes. In the process, she refuses to believe that heaven is anywhere else other than in Daddy’s home.

All men are not equal! As it were, every human society is one akin to an animal farm. Some are born with a sil­ver spoon in their mouths; others die like church mice. Still others simply do not exist.

Whatever it is, both the poor and rich must eat everyday, so the issu­ance of chopmoney is common to every home. It is the mode of dis­bursement that differs.

Where money is a scarce commod­ity, the chopmoney must be dished out with extreme care. It must be balanced against rent, electricity and water bills, food and medicare. Where the balance is thrown out of gear, then the man must either become a magician and do wonders or turn a financial wizard and engage himself in mysteries.

Financial magic is a professional course most Sikaman husbands take in order to enable them qualify as re­sponsible husbands. The only problem is that they are not issued with certifi­cates after graduation. Most laughable is the fact that they never realise that they have enrolled to study Financial Magic and have passed out with flying colours.

Furthermore, in the days of Kutu Acheampong, Ghana started receiving world acclaim as a country, where ev­ery man is a magician who has studied in the college of how to make ends meet.

Those were the days when Gha­naians were asked to tighten their belts. But it was needless to ask them to tighten their belts, because they naturally had to, since their waistlines were nothing to write home about; and anyone who didn’t tighten his belt was bound to walk about naked. His pair of trousers would simply give way.

SECRET

In those ways, husbands were wary about the chopmoney they dished out. They were aware that wives had also gone to school to study how to over-estimate the daily chopmoney by discreetly inflating prices by a secret percentage on groceries and all con­sumables.

The wives were skilled-in over and under-invoicing, and the husbands had clear evidence of the newly acquired skills of their dear wives.

The wives were constantly buying new funeral cloths, changing hair­styles, purchasing fashionable foot­wear, surprisingly without accessing foreign loans. It was a mystery hus­bands who could not unravel unless they became aware that their wives’ domestic accounting skills had become legendary.

Somehow, the women were justi­fied in engaging in domestic budgetary acrobatics and gymnastics to buy for themselves their needs because their husbands were not prepared to do that.

Moreover, they complained that their husbands smoked, drank ak­peteshie and chased women with their meagre salaries. After all these, they came back home and snored like pigs. So why shouldn’t the women resort to ‘chobo’ to get a few things for them­selves?

DEMAND

Today, men have started demand­ing that their wives should get ready to start dishing out chopmoney in the wake of a new Bill that is seeking to make man and woman equal before God and Man. Men will no longer be considered head of the home and can­not insist on sex when their wives are not in the mood.

In that case, it would be difficult to come to terms with the fact that he who pays the piper does not call the tune. In any event of equality, rights as well as responsibilities must be shared across board.

Women should be required to give 50 per cent of the chopmoney and retain the right to ‘no sex’ and the freedom to wear double shorts to bed instead of a simple nightgown.

I wonder what will become of the culture that has propelled African mar­riages to outlast their European coun­terparts. Our fathers and fore-fathers, mothers and their forebears stayed put in marriage, sustained through an ideal cultural setting.

Should this cultural setting become disturbed by man-made laws, the introduction of alien values and whims, marriage as an institution is bound to undergo a cataclysmic transformation.

The result will be widespread di­vorce, the proliferation of single moth­ers and a new breed of prostitutes, the abandonment of marital responsibili­ties, and the perpetration and perpet­uation of marital and domestic license and anarchy. God bless Sikaman.

This article was first published

on February 22, 2003