As a kid, one of  my favourite aunts was auntie Agatha. I loved that woman to bits…..God bless her soul.

She smelt luxurious, was always well dressed, well coiffed and the most  impressionable part for a six year old, was the way she magically produced lollipops (which we fondly called Agatha) from her beautiful handbags. I used to tell my mum all the time that I wanted to grow up and be rich like auntie Agatha. What was lost on me was why my mum’s face always fell or why other family members snickered when I said that. Eventually, I found out years later that auntie Agatha was a kept woman.

I was amazed at the indignation many Ghanaians felt when Moesha Boduong ( is that even her real name?) told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that she dated married men to take care of her because the economy was not good.

That ‘revelation’ didn’t surprise me one bit.

I have heard Moesha say something along the same vein on the Delay show. And yes, she got bashed for a minute on  social media but it was not this vicious because I suppose Delay is not Christiane Amanpour.

I am a child of the world now and no longer the naïve six year old who thought auntie Agatha was more successful than my mother because she drove a nice 2-Door S-Class Mercedes Benz compared to my mum’s old Datsun Bluebird. There are many a kept women in Ghana. I know lots of women who earn less than a thousand Ghana Cedis and spend three times that amount monthly, easily. They are well kept.

I do not judge them. For whatever reason, that is the path they took – it could be poverty, lack of ambition, over ambition, laziness or greed. Who know and who cares.

Years ago I knew a girl who was a student and came from a really humble background. She was dating a very rich married man, who gave her a brand new phone, a nice car and had her hostel fees paid for. I remember wondering for a minute how she managed to take the car home, when her mother was a petty trader and her father a low paid salaried worker. Her parents obviously never questioned her or perhaps she didn’t park the car at home.  Who knew and who cared?

The outrage against Moesha is not because of the truth…it is the platform. People’s beef seems to be about the fact that she is painting Ghanaian women in a bad light on an international stage. I noticed how women (many kept women) wrote loads of invectives and spewed so much nonsense on social media about this issue. Ghanaians seem to love illusions…..Pretend something doesn’t exist and somehow hope it will go away. Notice how some Ghanaians don’t pick up their calls from someone waiting for them, when they are running late – instead of picking up and apologising or better still call when they realise they are running late? Their aim is to somehow show up and hopefully the person waiting would have forgotten how late they were? I can never understand that. But similarly, we like to hide our head in the sand like ostriches…

Is Moesha someone to celebrate or be proud of?…certainly not. There are hardworking Ghanaian women who are not kept women and who have overcome numerous obstacles including a vicious male chauvinistic culture to get to where they are at now.

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I am more embarrassed about the current debacle of the sixty Ghanaians posing as journalists who tried to illegally enter Australia for the commonwealth games. Their reason? “I guess our economy is such that you need someone to take care of you”.  Now that is truly embarrassing to Ghana.