Palaver of the busy policeman

I GUESS to become a very good cop master, one must have the patience to listen to plenty of nonsense without feeling dizzy. That is why I advised a policeman friend to eat four balls of Ga kenkey every morning to cope with the job.  He has taken my advice, and each morning, you can see him walking like a ball of kenkey.

The complaints come in many forms and ramifications. A husband who can’t take his wife’s nagging any longer bursts into the charge office fuming with red eyes and promptly declares that his wife is in danger. Asked to give details, he says that he has well-rehearsed plans to slap the woman with such horse-power that she’d get brain damage if she doesn’t fall into coma.

Asked to give further details, he says, his wife has been nagging him for 17 years now about frivolous matters including akpeteshie drinking, although he has told her there is no way he can stop drinking the stuff. In short, he is lodging a complaint to precede the domestic revolutionary action, which he believes can be comparable to the Iranian Ayatollah revolution.

The disgruntled husband then proceeds to define what a revolution is and elucidates on the different types of revolutions. By the time he ends his complaint, he has told his life history in perfect detail, beginning from where and when he was born.

If the policeman is not patient he cannot listen to such a complaint. But it is in listening that he can diagnose whether the complainant is merely suffering from a hangover or has a genuine case to contest.

Anyhow, the wife must be invited to give her version of the domestic palaver. But it is not in her nature to go straight to point. God forbid! She must give the account in such an elaborate manner to make it plausible, to portray her husband as Satan personified. Such an account must be bombastic in nature, alliterative in content, and proverbial in style.

But she must begin by driving home the point that she is from a royal family, quite similar to the circumstances of Lady Diana, and must be regarded as such. If the policeman says the point is irrelevant and, therefore, not germane to the case at hand, she insist that it is relevant, even pertinent to the case. And she’d prove why.

Before the policeman gets to listen to the real case 45 minutes has elapsed. And the real case. “My husband is the worst form of idiot you can find worldwide. He is a fool, he is a hopeless man, he’s a damn fool. In a nutshell, he is not normal…”

The policeman will raise a point of order and remind her that the forum isn’t for delivering abusive missiles but to solve a matter amicably so that husband can go back home hand-in-hand.

Wahalla

Finally, the woman, in boring detail will preach a litany of her husband’s misconduct and transgression which border on alcoholic predilections, chopmoney wahalla, extra-time demands for sex, total neglect of  the children, kola chewing, common smoking, insulting of mothers-in-law, whatever.

By the time she is half-way through, the policeman is no longer listening. Instead he’d be dozing, on the verge of snoring away.

In conclusion, the woman would swear that she has no patience for a man with so many problems and that is prepared for a divorce. If the divorce isn’t granted, she’d leave the children and run away so that the husband would learn sense.

At this point, the policeman comes to realise that he is dealing with exceptional couples who can talk for 24 hours non-stop and require more time to conclude. So he must not allow any of the parties to cross examine the other, otherwise, he’d lose stamina and run out of gas, despite eating four balls of kenkey early in the morning.

He must proceed to counsel the couple, pointing it out to them that their basic problem is that they talk too much for comfort. If they could talk less and concentrate on the solution of their problems, they’d be making a headway. Divorce may not be the answer. Life-long marriage demands mutual love and understanding. Case close! The couples go back home fuming and the policeman can breathe easily now. Too much tension to begin with!

Salute

He must now walk around and stretch his muscles. He walks outside the charge office yawning and is confronted by a laughing lunatic. He salutes the policeman.

Go away from here,” the officer orders promptly.

“Go away to where?” the mad man enquires. “I’ve come to lodge a complaint. I want you to go and arrest the government. From morning till now, I’ve not eaten yor ke gari. It’s not fair to me.”

After handling the crazy fellow’s complaint, a furious woman almost bounds into him. She has come to lodge a complaint that her next-door neighbour is fond of looking into her soup pot whenever she is preparing soup. This is her last warning, she swears.

Another comes to complain that a neighbour’s child has defecated all over her veranda and the mother is not willing to scrub off the green stomach matter.

The last ludicrous complaint a young woman of about 35 made to a police officer was about a fortnight ago. She had come to complain about a man who presented himself to her as a burgher from Germany. He promised to marry her and she obliged. The man promised to give her some dollars, so she allowed him to have sex with her so many times even when she was not in the mood for it. “The man likes the thing too much,” she lamented.

The last time they met, the man folded a GH¢500 note and tucked it into her palm when she went to see him off at night. She thought it was 100 dollars. She got home and realised that it was common GH¢500. She had since not seen the man. She was depressed and wanted to know from the cop whether the man could be jailed for the “offence”, coming to realise that the man was not a burgher after all?

The policeman was amused. “As for this one, please go and solve it yourself,” he said. “I tire!”

 This article was first published on Saturday September 19, 1998