Where are our Girls?
Priscilla Blessing Bentum, a 21-year-old Ghanaian woman was kidnapped on August 17th, 2018
Ruth Love Quayson, an 18-year-old Ghanaian girl was kidnapped on December 4th, 2018
Priscilla Koranchie, a 15-year-old Ghanaian child was kidnapped on December 21st, 2018
On Wednesday, June 12, 2019, around 6:00am, I was preparing to host my show, Breakfast Daily [on Citi TV] when my producer informed me that the kidnapped girls had been found. I was immediately overjoyed and grateful. I imagined how my co-host and I would finally celebrate our security agencies after months of criticizing them for failing to rescue three Ghanaian citizens.
Rescue of Abducted Canadian Girls
This was before I read the press release from the Information Minister.
My co-host had already started reading the release when I blurted out ‘wow, the Takoradi girls have finally been found.’ He looked at me with a blank stare and said the girls who were found were not the Takoradi girls but the Canadians who were kidnapped less than two weeks ago.
I read the brief press release and my mind went blank.
I felt a wave of sadness and sorrow.
I was hurt, I was disappointed, I was ashamed to be Ghanaian.
I cared about the Canadian girls and was happy for them but I felt our leaders had prioritized non-Ghanaians over Ghanaians.
The last line of the Information Minister’s Statement on the Rescue of Abducted Canadians stung badly.
“Citizens and travelers are once again assured that Ghana remains safe.”
Are Citizens and Travelers Equals?
I found this statement ironic. Not only had our government failed to find our own Ghanaian citizens but also added salt to injury by presenting this statement as though it placed the same premium it had on foreigners on us locals. From the swift rescue of the Canadian girls, we could clearly see that travelers had some assurance that Ghana is indeed safe. They were assured that if they are kidnapped while touring Ghana, our government will do everything in its power to rescue them.
What tangible results can our government give Ghanaians after almost one year of investigating the abduction of three of its own citizens?
Rebecca Quayson, sister of Ruth Love Quayson (one of the kidnapped girls) summed up what most of us felt:
“…we are already disappointed in the way they are handling the issue, because we all know that in Ghana our leaders treat foreigners special, but I don’t know why they are wasting time when it comes to the issue of my sister, for this rescue for just some few days they have rescued them.”
We Want to Leave Ghana!
Soon after the news of the rescued Canadians girls broke, some Ghanaians voiced their disappointment in our government’s failure to find Ghanaian citizens. They joked about traveling to Canada to get Canadian passports so the Ghanaian government will place some value on their lives. As always, our humor had a bit of truth to it. Last year, a Pew Research Center report found that 75% of Ghanaians will want to travel abroad. Why won’t we want to leave a country that has shown us that it does not prioritize our lives and security above everything else?
“Our victims know us by their wounds and shackles: that is what makes their testimony irrefutable. They only need to know what we have done to them for us to realize what we have done to ourselves.” – Frantz Fanon.
Priscilla Blessing Bentum, a full-blooded Ghanaian citizen disappeared on August 2018, we heard no warnings from foreign countries about Ghana being a safety concern. Ruth Love Quayson and Priscilla Koranchie disappeared in December 2018, we heard nothing from the outside world. Two Canadian girls go missing and within days Canada and Australia both released statements warning their nationals against traveling to Ghana for security reasons. In less than two weeks, our government finds these girls and assures the international community that Ghana is safe.
It is one thing for foreigners to not place any value on our lives and another thing for us to not place any value on our own lives.
Since December, Ghanaians all over the country have been pleading for the return of the three Takoradi girls. Their families have come out countless times to plead with the government to find them and we have not seen the same results we have with these Canadian girls.
What is this supposed to tell us about our worth as Ghanaians in our own motherland?
Oops! I did not Actually Mean They Were Found
On April 2nd 2019, the Director-General of Ghana’s Criminal Investigations Department, COP Maame Yaa Tiwaa Addo-Danquah told reporters that the CID knew where the girls were. She assured their family members to keep on keeping on, saying the girls were safe and would be brought back home soon. After weeks of public backlash for paying lip service to rescuing the girls, the Director-General of the CID came out to admit that she did not mean what she said and merely wanted to give some hope to the families of these missing girls.
Don’t Paint Us Black To Foreigners!
In February, 2019, former president John Dramani Mahama met with a group of foreign diplomats to explain what happened at the Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election from his perspective. As a politician, his views were obviously to be exaggerated to make his opponent look bad. But it was the response of Honorable Yaw Osafo-Marfo, the current Senior Minister, that shocked me.
He alluded to the fact that the actions of the former president was ‘unpatriotic and shameful’ not because there was no merit to what he said as far as our failure to hold a peaceful by-election in the capital City of Ghana, after 27 years of being as democratic state was concerned, but that he ‘gathered foreigners and tried to Paint Ghana Black.’
Punishing A Criminal Won’t Solve Our Money Problem
Last year, Aisha Huang, a Chinese national was arrested for allegedly participating in illegal mining, an act that hundreds of Ghanaians are serving time for. It was rumoured that Aisha Huang’s prowess within the illegal mining ecosystem was so strong, it earned her the title ‘Queen of Illegal Mining.’ Aisha Huang was deported on the basis of nolle prosequi, a legal term for voluntarily discontinuing case which is at the discretion of the Attorney General. Ghanaians were once again disappointed that this ‘Queen of Illegal Mining’ was getting away, but we respected and accepted the decision of the Attorney General, until the Senior Minister attempted to explain why the Chinese Citizen had to be deported instead of facing prosecution like the other criminals who were caught.
“Putting [Aisha Huang] in jail in Ghana is not going to solve your money problems. It is not going to make you happy or me happy… We have a very good relationship with China. The main company that is helping develop the infrastructure system in Ghana is Sinohydro. It is a Chinese Company. It is the one that is going to help process our bauxite and provide about $2 billion to us. So when there are these kinds of arrangements there are other things behind the scenes. There are many other things beyond what we see in these matters and everybody is wide awake. The most important thing is that we established regulations and we are protecting our environment. That is far more important than one Chinese woman who has been deported back to her country,” Honorable Yaw Osafo Marfo said.
The government came out to clarify that the senior minister spoke on his own authority and not for government but the harm had already been done. We were left with that dry feeling at the back of your throat when you know someone is taking you for granted, does not value you but you’re too tired to waste the little moisture left in your mouth to complain.
“Each age has its peculiar opacities and its urgent missions. The parts we play in the design and direction of the historical transformations are shadowed by the contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Sometimes we break the mold; at others, our will is broken.”
-Homi K. Bhabha
I could excuse the behavior of our leaders if they actually had the willpower to make us feel worthy and were being resisted by powers beyond them to continue making us feel like second class citizens in our own country. Or perhaps if utterances like those by the senior minister did not make me feel so sad in my own country. I cannot see whose interest my government represents from the way it handles events that challenge it to make me feel proud to be Ghanaian.
“Citizens and travelers are once again assured that Ghana remains safe.”
This line from the information minister might have been harmless but when positioned within the context of the disappointments some of us have felt by the people who are supposed to protect us, it is difficult not to read it with cynicism.
Two Canadian girls were kidnapped and rescued in less than two weeks.
Three Ghanaian girls have been missing since August and our security agencies are still doing their best with investigations.
“A theology and the effects of theology I realized I carry in myself. It was not the world that was my oppressor only. What the world does to you, if the world does it long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do it to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice of your own murderers because you believe in the things they do.” – James Baldwin.
Our government is not made up of foreigners, it is made up of Ghanaians who know too well the wounds of colonization and are supposed to bring us satisfaction from the independence our forefathers fought for. Our leaders are our countrymen who are supposed to ensure we enjoy privileges we were denied by our colonial masters, why then are Ghanaian citizens fighting for their basic human right to quality life and security in their own country?
Every day Ghanaians take to the streets to demonstrate over basic things such as good roads, decent pay, clean water, functional health care system, proper drainage system, things that we should not have to beg for let alone fight for. But we are an independent sovereign country so we engage this democracy we are supposed to be enjoying with an equal dose of hope and cynicism. We get angry, we cry, we march, we scream our frustrations to the media, we ask our government to solve our problems. They pretend to be listening, we pretend to have some faith in their ability to prioritize our needs. They disappoint us, we complain and eventually accommodate their inability to make us feel worthy in our own country.
The writer, Dziffa Akua Ametam, is co-host of Breakfast Daily on Citi TV