Features
The thief-catching committees…
There are different breeds including those labelled as ‘cautious thieves’. They are not the bold type and, therefore, steal when no one is looking. However, such thieves are not lucky because they do not have the qualities of the spider. When you think no one is looking, someone might be looking from an angle acute to your left ear.
Some thieves realise the fact that they do not have eight eyes and, therefore, adopt the bold strategy approach. Such a type would walk straight into your house and tell your wife that you’ve sent him to come and service the television and video-deck.
The deck and telly are all in excellent condition and your wife will express a bit of doubt about why you’ve sent a repairer but…
“You mean Mr Osei sent you?”
“Yes. He says the integrated circuit needs to be changed to improve picture quality. A taxi is waiting outside.”
The wife is bound to believe this because the man is bedecked in the working gear of a TV repairman and holds a tester in hand.
Moreover, he walks like a radio-mechanic, smiles like an electronic engineer and has a transistor-like nose. And he is talking knowledgeably about something called integrated circuit which is a scientific term not akin to the vocabulary of housewives.
“When will you bring it back?”
“Before six o’clock. Lest I forget, he says I should take GH¢6,000 from you for transportation and incidental expenses.
So the guy is smart enough to take away all your electronic equipment in addition to GH¢6,000 for beer and khebab.”
Another brand of thieves comprise those who use force. They arm themselves with rifles, semi-automatic weapons, machets, kitchen knives and grenades. They are called armed robbers or jaguda (Nigeria parlance), and they normally operate gangs.
In some cases, there are certain requirements one must meet before he can be a member of a gang. For example you’re below a certain height you’ll not be eligible for admission because when it comes to making an escape you may be found wanting.
You must have the kind of muscles that can help in street-fighting and your face must be distinguished on the negative side, meaning that you must be looking hard and satanic-looking.
After you’ve been robbed, armed robbers can also kill you if they see a possibility of you identifying them later. Dead men don’t talk too much!
The day I really got angry with thieves was in 1985 when one of them professionally stole my Mum’s corn-dough. The old lady had soaked corn and had it grinded out of which she prepared dough in a large rubber container. That night the door to the kitchen was not locked and in the morning we discovered that our dream of having banku that day would not materialise.
Well, I guess the wife of the thief was overjoyed because for two weeks corn-dough would not be a problem to her. She’d only have to “claim’ some okro and tuna and if the husband had been able to steal some crabs, then it must have been a festival.
Stealing has become a profession, albeit an infamous one. It is counter-productive to the progress of society and that is why thieves are enemies of mankind. You can be a millionaire but a thief can make you a penninaire in five seconds. For this reason, the idea of watch-dog committees became laudable sometime back and even now. It was even fashionable for communities to inaugurate their watch dog committees and swear to crush the balls of petty thieves and armed robbers.
But the question is whether some of these thief-catching committees are just existing in name or are really functioning?
I was just asking my younger brother, Edward Alomele, alias Alor, who is an Organising Secretary of a Watch- Dog Committee, what exactly they are doing to combat theft in the community. We are doing a lot,” he said
“But I’ve never seen you in action? I’ve never seen you attending meetings and organising strategies.
You’ve never attended patrols.”
Well, it is normal for everybody to defend the group he or she belongs to, and so I was not surprise that Original Alor, sorry Duplicate Alor, was trying to defend organisation.
“We are always alert and we normally do not advertise ourselves. All our members are always on the lookout for suspicious characters and you’ll be surprise that any thief who ventures would be caught,” he said
I wasn’t quite convinced, though. However, Alor is confident that the committee is alive and kicking. Perhaps, some logistics would make them a bit more revolutionary, and more aggressive (General Quainoo, please accept my apologies for now).
That also brings to mind the police, Ghanaian policemen, in spite of their numerous short-comings have been commended of late. They are breaking up criminal syndicates, but I guess that they would be more effective in dealing with robberies when they work hand-in-hand with watchdog committees.
I’ll recommend that all watchdog committees be re-inaugurated and revitalised and taught how to work better with the police. They must also be given incentives without which commitment to work will run down to zero. The committee members must also receive some sort of training to make them more disciplined and purposeful.
I guess it wasn’t only my mother’s corn-dough that has ended up in a thief-man’s cooking pot. Others too have suffered the loss of more valuable items like TV sets, car tyres, windscreen, cash, sound system and chamber-pots.
My former classmate, Kwame Korkorti, does not like thieves at all. He started hating them since 1961 when some palm-nut soup laden with goat meat his mother had prepared disappeared rather mysteriously from the coalpot. A thief quietly relieved the coalpot of its burden and made Korkorti’s stomach tumble and groan.
The article was first published of Saturday, October 16, 1993
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
Join our WhatsApp Channel now!
https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBElzjInlqHhl1aTU27
Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
Join our WhatsApp Channel now!
https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBElzjInlqHhl1aTU27
