Communications consultant Raymond Ablorh has condemned the Kumerica Movement; a playful likening of Kumasi( Asante) to America by renaming towns in Asante and treating it as an independent state. For him, the joke reveals an inferiority complex on the part of the supporters at a time chains of inferiority should be falling apart.
He contends that the joke portrays the general lack of a sense of self-worth and self-appreciation on the part of Ghanaians which sadly has not been cured through education.
“Kumerica is very unlike Kumasi (Asante). The Asante I’ve known since my infancy isn’t a mental inferiority patient. Even what people joke with reveals a lot about them.
It seems the mental chains on our people’s minds are rather getting stronger instead of rusting and wearing off their minds with the passage of time. The same thinking influenced the choice of names like Kumahood, Ghallyhood, etc,” he wrote on social media.
He condemned the tendency to adopt American or European ways of doing things as a sign of accomplishment, blaming our system of education for having reinforced the inferiority complex.
“We generally lack sense of self-worth and self-appreciation. Eating, speaking, sleeping in or wearing Europe and America is more fulfilling and a mark of having arrived. We display it everyday.
Our education is supposed to heal us but sadly people come out of our educational system with these chains well-polished and strengthened instead,” he argued.
Mr Ablorh joins several other persons who have condemned the Kumerica craze.
The Kumerica movement started on social media when two teenagers compared Kumasi to America, naming Kumasi Kumerica. It went viral. Towns in Kumasi have been renamed after America cities, a flag resembling that of the America has been designed, visas are being jokingly issued to non-Kumericas and so on.
But many have kicked against the joke. While an overwhelming number see it as a mere joke that has no harm or subtle meanings at all.
One Daniel Yiadom Boakye wrote: “I find it very disappointing seeing people with socio-political clouts like Kofi Kofi Adoma of Kofi TV and the Communications Minister, Hon. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful having acquired Kumerican Visas as well as a top-class musician like Shatta Wale having a song that associates with the name Kumerica.
We love our Kumasi and all the names of places in it the way they are and by extension, our Ghana the way it is.”
