As bitter as a pill might be, at times there is no option than to swallow it to cure an illness. This article is one such.

As a budding writer, I have learnt to give keen attention to the sentence construction of individuals. From my little experience, text messages are usually well thought through. That is to say, any message sent is truly what an individual wants to communicate but for some exceptions.

As psychologists rightly put it, texts also allow people to be more comfortable opening up about their experiences and thoughts than they tend to be in person.

The best explanation of the phenomenon is Oscar Wilde’s well-known quote: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

The masks here are the phone and texts that makes individuals honest, annoying, or pushed further, to be a little bit deviant.

Again, messages if not read thoroughly, can be misconstrued. You might be wondering what exactly, I am referring to.

Here it is:

Over a three-month period, thirty minutes of my day was dedicated to reading the comment section under posts of news articles. This led to important discoveries.

• The social media app determines the kind of reaction you get from its users.
• Most comments can be insulting
• Some comments indue-depression
• Some comments fuel inferiority complex
• Finally, some comments create split personality

On the usual surfing, this time, I noticed the comment section was all congratulatory and joyous. It got me thinking, was I wrong about the claim that the comment section is a place people poured their frustrations, but alas I scrolled to take a second look at the news article and it was “Boxing sensation Freezy MacBones ditches Ghana for UK after applying for GBA license.”

As patriotic as I am, it left me dumbfounded. Are there no pleasant memories of the country for other citizens to be excited another will choose a foreign land over his ancestral home? Imagine Hilda Baci, the Nigerian who broke the Guinness Book of Records for the longest time spent cooking, trading her roots for the United Kingdom. What a blow it will be! Is it the case that African isn’t worthy of great minds?

Back to the comment section of Freezy MacBones, I expected people to advise him to reconsider his decision because as the saying goes - there is no place like home. On the contrary, it was the opposite. People sent congratulatory messages for the decision he had made.

That leads me to the question, “Is Ghana that bad?”

In search of answers, I spoke to a few friends about what their future plans were. Out of the 20 young people, I asked "will you choose Ghanaian citizenship over British nationality"…not one of them hesitated. They quickly responded in the negative, "I will choose British citizenship over Ghana." Others added that they would not return.

One will say it is out of sheer youthful exuberance which made these young people hold such views, so I visited the Malam Atta market to speak to a few vendors and they shared the same view.

I ask again, Is Ghana that bad?

What happened to the saying that a black man is capable of running his own affairs? What happened to better Ghana agenda? What happened to be citizens, not spectators?

From my conversations, one thing was clear, if there were no processes- that is passport acquisition, visa application, cost of ticket, and job security, the country will be empty.

Why does a country with brilliant economists and businessmen have to keep depending on external donors?

And pensioners are made to feel as if the government was looking for the fastest way to push them to their early graves. What more is there?

Is Ghana truly nothing to write home about?