Dr Stephen Opuni, a former CEO of Ghana COCOBOD, buried the mortal remains of her beloved mother over the weekend at Babianiha in the Brong Ahafo Region and his choice of tomb has got everyone talking on social media.
Media report suggests that he tomb, which is in the form of a building was financed by the children of the deceased to honour their mother. All her children are successful professionals including Dr Opuni, a medical officer at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, two engineers based in the United States, etc.
However lots of people are not enthused about this opulence. Celebrity blogger, Chris Vincent criticised vehemently the action on his Facebook page.
See below for extract of his post:
No one is saying Dr Opuni used state’s money to erect this offensively ridiculous grave edifice for his dead mother and neither has anyone claimed that he is the only wealthy individual in his family.
Everyone with riches has a legal right and perhaps a natural right to allot and use his wealth as he sees fit.
But which right thinking Ghanaian can, in the face of the fact that malaria kills 3 Ghanaian children daily, about 40% of the entire population do not have access to common clean drinking water and a large number of the population cannot even afford basic health care–say that one or a group of the people from this same region have best used their wealth acquired from this country judiciously by erecting this edifice for a dead woman? Especially, when a child next door probably hasn’t even had a balanced diet in a year.
This is like saying, instead of giving your surplus to the needy or being human to help others by cutting down on what you do not need, you would rather overfeed your dogs with it–after all, it’s your own food or money.
It’s our sense of commitment to the well-being of just our own to the detriment of the general good of everyone we can possibly make an impact in their lives, to foster collective progress that this picture captures.
The opulence is beautiful and probably cheaply affordable by those who paid for it. But if measured against the background, the very soil it sits on, it’s a clear illustration of the inherent Ghanaian viciousness and our increasing sense of greed.
How do you justify this to a poor third world population–especially the woman whose baby died a few miles away because she couldn’t get access to a good healthcare facility?
See it out below
