'Ateyie ma awerεfire'.
This popular Akan adage literally translates as "good conditions elicit forgetfulness".
That is the only basis for which a Ghanaian footballer who starts life on a dusty community pitch faced with all the challenges of life in this abandoned continent of ours, would spend his hard earned dollars lavishly on women as if he were the first son of computer magnate, Bill Gates.
Great Ghanaian football talents namely Arthur Moses, Bashiru Gambo, Emmanuel Duah, Michael Essien, Odartey Lamptey (pictured below with ex-wife) and so on have once upon a time been victims of dangerous money-chewing Safari women who go after the wallets of innocent footballers.
Like boa constrictors in the jungle, these clingy women will start out silently and misleading. At first, it begins with showing her best side.
She’ll get close, flirt and be a wildcat in the sack. They are all around our dollar-making Black Stars players so much so that they almost suffocate them with their coils.
Not even advice from King Solomon would urge these players to sit up until they are hit hard by the realities of life. Unfortunately such lessons are learnt the hard way - by which time all the dollars might have vamoosed.
A fool and his money are soon parted. The average Ghanaian foreign-based player would spend profligately on fleets of cars, women, and friends forgetting that there is tomorrow.
How could Afriyie Acquah, allegedly nicknamed 'monkey' by his own wife as heard on the viral tape, have put himself in such a mess?
From humble beginnings of playing for the Glentoran Academy in the Brong Ahafo Region, Afriyie temporarily moved to BA United but had to leave camp without notice after having some problems with the team's officials. Fortunately for him, Oliver Arthur's Bechem United were lurking in the corner.
Little did Acquah know that God was going to open an opportune door for him during a Bechem United tour in Italy. Palermo took him on, and the rest of the story is public knowledge.
Having got the opportunity to play for the Black Stars under coach Kwesi Appiah, mother luck smiled on him when he scored on his debut for the team in Malawi.
Despite putting up a solid performance, he was dropped from the Black Stars squad at South Africa 2013. But by dint of hard work and support from the local media, Acquah finally broke into Avram Grant's starting XI.
The football public was therefore taken aback when news broke that in spite of all these bitter experiences that life had offered Afriyie, he could only find a wife in a certain Amanda, a divorcée.
How could it be that a young man starting life would marry a divorcée?
Those who attended the grand wedding between Acquah and Amanda had to console themselves with the fact that love is blind. Sometimes, whether a woman is crazy, clingy, reckless, or just can’t stop having sex with other people, you won’t care because she’s hot.
After all, dating is like a safari - but on a safari you have qualified guards who know the lay of the land and the predators. In the dating world, however, your only guide is the man downstairs, and he might lead you in the wrong direction.
But even those of us with no gift of clairvoyance foresaw that the marriage was not going to work! Barely six months after, a sex tape from Amanda went viral.
The sort of venom she spewed against her ex-husband, the business mogul Kenpong, were indescribable.
A year into the marriage, the same Amanda - who was praising her current husband - in the first leaked sex tape, is now claiming the Black Stars midfielder is impotent.
Among other things, she says on the leaked tape: “Jordan [Ayew] slept with me for four years not four days. If he was going to tell my husband, he would have done it by now. Since I met monkey [referring to Acquah], I have never cheated.”
“[Jordan] was begging me to come back. He even asked me what I saw in this village boy [Acquah] that made me leave him [Jordan]."
“Afriyie even asked if Jordan loves me. [Jordan] never wanted to speak to me when he saw me in Ghana with Afriyie. But, we [Amanda and Jordan] were childhood friends.”
"Afriyie is very jealous, I swear. Whenever Afriyie sets his eyes on us [Amanda and Jordan] having a chat or hanging out, he quickly gets furious and stops talking to me until I apologise," Mrs. Acquah said.
"Afriyie used to complain about his ailing relationship with Jordan Ayew. Afriyie once recounted that they travelled to Amsterdam and only Dede spoke to him but Jordan didn’t. He asked for Jordan’s contact but [Jordan] refused," she added.
Amanda is indeed the chimera - a mixture of dangerous women all rolled up into one. Probably, her beauty made Afriyie disregard common sense and good advice sounded like a siren’s call.
The bigger picture is that she has set Jordan Ayew and her husband on a collision course and this might have far-reaching consequence for the Black Stars team as a whole.
They say pieces of advice don’t change man, but calamities do.
This is a big lesson to the current crop of Black Stars players namely: Asamoah Gyan, Andre Ayew, Kwadwo Asamoah, David Accam and the likes. That is, if what happened to Arthur Moses, Odartey Lamptey and the other senior colleagues in their encounters with women could not serve as deterrent.
It's about time some of you invested properly and stopped the idiocy.
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Dan Kwaku Yeboah is sports editor at Accra-based Peace FM and editor-in-chief of Ghana Sports Online.
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