The Commodity of Children

They sell fish and nets and kids at roughly the same price. And the kids are human kids, not goats, but their parents are marketing them. They litter in tens and twelves: 3 may not survive ill-health, 5 to do the menial jobs, 4 for sale if the fish fetches low prices. Arrests hardly happen. Prosecutions never nail them. It may be Vigilante-Time.

New Rule: One-Month Seizure

A driver sees the red lights come up. He’d rather not stop because (unlike the other people in the gridlock) he has somewhere to go...urgently.

Another driver swerves out of the traffic line and cuts a through-course across the hard shoulder. Street vendors just manage to sprint out of harm’s way.

A traffic cop halts both cars. He takes down the particulars of the cars and of the drivers. He calmly motions the passengers to come down. He takes the keys away from the drivers. The cop has no choice but to be firm. A camera blinks at him from a nearby pole or fence.

In 20 minutes, tow trucks arrive. The now-repentant cars are ‘craned’ up and whisked off to the government ‘Hold’ an hour’s drive outside Accra. They will hibernate there for 1 month.

1 month cannot run quickly enough. If the driver wants his car back, he must visit the ‘Hold’ outside Accra, and fork out the ‘fine’. The fine has a built-in rental for the space and care of the car.

A document is signed. It shows the fine has been paid. It is also a bond that on the third seizure, your licence will go, and on the fifth seizure, your car would go.

If I had the power to make a rule about life in Accra, this is what I think I’d do. Reader, what would you do with that power? What would you change?

Smallpox in Court in 2010!

Shame on the liked lawyer who ‘couriered’ his unwilling understudy last week to announce that he had the chicken pox, and could not continue his case. Today, he returned, hardly pockmarked, I must say. He announced that he’d contracted malaria and ... wait for this ... smallpox! Gosh, smallpox was ‘dinosaured’ in the 1970s. He was lying about the illness, no?

Seriously, the Police...

The police were not my friends. Then they curtailed the scary robbery statistics. They even charmed my respect and friendship. That means I’d slip them a little ‘something’ (money) every night. Last night, I was stopped four times by the police within twenty minutes. Each time, I was shunted out of the traffic line. It was just past 9 p.m. Each time, I had to “open your boot”. Each time, I had to flash my driving licence. For a while, I’d praised this ‘professionalism’. Then I realized they’d just wanted to extort money. Why? Because my boyish looks made me a likely soft target.

Modesty Means Long Life

In another Ghana glitch (also known as ‘movie’) an *Asafo team went off to war with the next village. Deep in the forest, where an ambush was likely to be sprung, the Asafo was chanting war songs, and their Goliath was leaping up-down, up-down like he was competing with the giant trees for height, when an arrow cut him down. I laughed so hard that I upset the neighbourhood dog-siesta.

*A troop of soldiers

Senseless Movies in Accra

I just suffered through a gutter Ghanaian movie of machete brandishers, kidnappers for ransom and daylight murderers. It was missing just three things – a plot, rhyme and reason. I loathed it even more than the wanton-wickedness witchcraft flicks. If these mindless movies reflect this society ... hmm ... hmmm!

Breasts Pressed, Messed

Am I more upset with the weak enforcement of criminal laws which drives mothers to desperation, or am I angrier with mothers who mutilate their daughters’ breasts to 'protect' them from paedophiles? Can the impotent law punish the mothers with a clear conscience? And what will the mothers say when their non-abused daughters reach their twenties with flattened udders?