Ghana is hard, I’ve heard this more than a dozen times this week—as if everywhere in the world is not equally hard when it comes to everything, including finding a job.
I have had several conversations in the last two weeks with many of my unemployed female graduate friends in Ghana who are desperately looking for jobs. And also, with those who are employed, but desperately want to change their jobs in search for better pay.
The complaints denominator almost each of them put up is how the men occupying the upper echelon of the corporate ladder want to have sex with them, in return for a job. This has been a century old rot and it does not shock me in any way that it lingers on and I do not think as long as desperation exists, anyone can totally annihilate this from the conversation.
I am not in any way supporting the culture of sex for job in Ghana but I am being honest and advocating for a different approach to solving or diminishing what mostly fuels this culture—DESPERATION.
Desperation, is perhaps the true root of all evil. Even when there’s an equal bargaining power, the moment one end becomes desperate, it automatically shifts the odds in favour of the end that’s not desperate—opening the desperate end to exploitation.
Human beings are inherently brutish and bandit, and would do whatever satisfies their selfish interest to the detriment of others, as Thomas Hobbes once argued in his moral and political philosophy of the State of Nature.
Therefore, expecting the relationship between a woman who’s desperate for a job and a man whose natural exigency for sex to be regulated by the loose conception of morals or the weak arms of the law in this department is just as leaving a meat on the floor near a cat, and expecting that it wouldn’t have a bite.
The keyword is DESPERATION; and that’s what I found to be the problem with a lot of my female friends. That’s also what the men who seem to hold the jobs in-between their sweaty balls are capitalizing on.
We can effectively water-down the power the men who are only ready to handout jobs after sex hold, by subduing the situational catalyst, DESPERATION.

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