POINT OF ORDER
BY
KWAME GYASI
Email: makgyasi@ug.edu.gh
“When you are given an American Ford Expedition car bribe, say it is a Japanese Toyota V8 car gift”
— Anon,
One of the definitions given by the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English of the word “stoop” is: “to bend down your body forward and down”. The dictionary goes on to give two examples of the use of the word “stoop” as follows: “we had to stoop to pass through the low entrance” and “Dave stooped down to tie his shoes”. To stoop is an unusual stand; it is posture of an enforced position taken as a result of necessity. It usually marks a derogatory, humiliating posture. When I was at Mfantsipim, first year students were refered to as greenhorns which is the most junior of the class status rising up to the senior status. As a greenhorn and a junior boy for that matter, if a senior boy wanted to either punish you or make a joke out of you, he will tell you either to “kneel down” or “stoop”. If you were asked to stoop, it meant you must bend down with the fingers of one had touching the ground and one leg raised towards the sky. It was a painful and humiliating exercise.
Many animals by the fact that they walk on all four limbs already find themselves in a stooping position. So many animals when they want to make sex, the male just climb on top of the female from behind, lie on the buttocks and just start poking. Later on in life, I got to know that human beings have come to adopt this animistic instinct and have come to accept that stooping is one of the positions human beings also adopt in sex making. There is an English book entitled: She Stooped to Conquer”, written by a famous British writer. I have never had the opportunity to read the book. However in the contemporary world, one interpretation somebody would gleeful give to the book could be a story of a woman who is so desperate for an almost impossible favour from a man in a very powerful position. To achieve her heart’s desire, this woman must have slept with the man and as a payback time, the man must have yielded to the demands of the woman. After the execution of the unholy contract both of them are likely go their separate ways happy in their minds and conquering spirits.
One thing I got to learn early in life was to never put yourself in a position where you will have to say thank you to somebody. One classical way of getting into that unfortunate position is to turn yourself into a beggar. A beggar must consistently and persistently say thank you to his or her benefactor, a very humiliating experience. It must have been for this matter that Kutu Acheampong must have adopted a national slogan of “self reliance”, i.e. encouraging the nation and the people of this country to depend on our own indigenous faculties and resources to develop the nation.
In management literature, there is a term referred to as: “organisation politics”. Organisation politics refer to the practice of using means other than merit or good performance for bettering your position or gaining favour in the organisation. Organisation politics include such things as trying to influence the boss, trying to gain power, and trying to gain a competitive edge over your peers. Many people often associate sneaky, devious, or unethical behaviour with the phrase organisation politics. However, this is not necessarily the case. There are many forms of organisation politics that are not sneaky, devious, or unethical. It is only when an individual pursues self-interest to the detriment of others or the organisation that the behaviour becomes unethical. When viewed in this light, almost any approach to organisation politics can be ethical or unethical, depending on how it is used.
Some of the ethical forms of organisation politics are:
- Showing loyalty to your boss
- Showing respect to your boss
- Seizing opportunities to make your boss look good
- Helping to take the load off your boss
- Seeking responsibility
- Gaining the respect of your subordinates
- Getting people to be obligated to you
Some of the unethical forms of organisation politics are
- Shifting the blame – One of the most common methods of gaining a competitive edge is to blame someone else for things that go wrong
- Stealing credit – Trying to take credit for everything good that happens. This is often the same person who attempts to shift the blame when things go wrong.
- Talking negatively about co-workers – Some employees attempt to gain a competitive edge by constantly bad-mouthing co-workers. The psychology of this approach, either conscious or unconscious, is to make oneself look good by discrediting others.
- Lying – Lying may be used in all of the previously discussed methods for gaining a competitive edge. A similar approach is not to lie but rather to fail to tell the whole story.
- Sleeping with your boss – This could happen in cases where the boss is either a man or a woman though it often happens where the boss is a man. If used successfully, the subordinate very often adopts better than thou attitude towards his or her colleague, and assumes a contemptuous, superior, petulant, disrespectful, arrogant, pompous, cynical, uncaring, quarrelsome, uncompromising, flamboyant posture bearing in mind that he or she has the support of the boss. These attitudinal changes are very common with women who are sleeping with their bosses. Those bosses very often find themselves ill-prepared to stir the dangerous tide of affairs. They become captives of their own indiscretion. During Kutu Acheampong’s time the phrase “bottom power” assumed immense importance where women were alleged to have slept with top politicians and public servants in exchange for VW Golf cars and other freebies.