You remember this man? The famous ‘Ayarikof’ from the 2012 elections, when after beating Dr Edward Mahama to become the PNC flagbearer, he went on to completely embarrass the party in the campaign cycle.
Dr Hassan Ayariga has yet to leave the Ghanaian political landscape; after losing the PNC’s flagbearer race for this year’s elections to Dr Mahama, he left to form his own party, the All People Congress (APC).
In an interview on Class Fm Tuesday, Mr Ayariga, who is the elder brother of Science and Technology Minister and Bawku Central MP Mahama Ayariga, made the offensive, ignorant and clueless assertion that having s*x whilst on your period is what leads to children with albinism.
Ironically, Hassan was called in to speak whilst the subject of discrimination against albinos was being discussed, and he ended up passing comments that could contribute to even worse discrimination against them among the more ignorant section of the populace (a significant chunk) who take everything they hear at face value and who would certainly recoil at the ‘process’ via which Ayariga claims albinos are made.
He said:
I did some survey and I was told anybody can give birth to an albino, but the process is this way: ‘…If your wife is bleeding and in the process you are too hungry and you don’t want to wait until it’s over, and you decide to do the thing while she’s bleeding, in the process if she gets pregnant – you know some [women] can get pregnant even while bleeding – that is when that particular child [albino] is born.’
That’s what I’m told, because of the process of blood [flow]. So, if in that process it happens that there are some women who are too fertile even as they bleed, [then they can give birth to an albino].”
Amazing that a Presidential candidate would say such a blatantly false statement and feel no embarrassment for it, but I guess we live in the age of Donald Trump now. So what’s next, s*x in the morning leads to boys and the evenings lead to girls? Parents who have s*x in their cars give birth to children with sickle cell disease? Has this clown ever heard of genetics?
Later in the interview, Hassan condemned the ritual killing of this albinos in several countries across the continent.
“Why would someone sacrifice another person in order to win power?” he wondered.
“For me, I don’t believe in those acts…if you begin to sacrifice human beings, a time will come that we’ll sacrifice our own parents because if you think an albino’s life is better, what about the one who gave birth to you? So, I think that this act should stop immediately”.
The problem with this country, and you see this from people like Hassan here, from a government approving a coal plant in this age of global warming, and from a preacher like Mensah Otabil sh*tting on the basic theories of science- this scientific illiteracy, that we seem almost proud to display. That is what would live us, and by u’s’ I mean Ghana and most of Africa- languishing in the 20th century, long after the rest of the world hit the 23rd.
*all quotes courtesy Classfmonline.Com*