Many young people have descended on my neighbourhood
Ghana’s children are on the streets selling pure water and many other odds and ends. When I was growing up, hawking was a casual sporadic enterprise of a few. Then, it was not a full-scale career for young people. But now, hawking has become the thing to do—for a lifetime. The children of the poor under-privileged, who live on the fringes of this society, are likely to end up as hawkers on the streets.
In the past one year, my Achimota neighbourhood has changed—drastically. My neighbourhood used to be a quiet residential part of Accra with nothing much happening. The on-going change is a fascinating and very worrying phenomenon. In just one year, it appears as if truckloads of young people with things to sell were poured onto the streets to attack vehicles. These youth spot a steely determination, get in your face, and are desperate. Robbery has also increased. A disaster has been waiting to happen.
Efo Baah was lynched:
This week, a young man was lynched the very next door to my place of abode. Let’s just call him Efo Baah. Early morning, I heard a commotion; crowd forming. Efo was being stoned and beaten mercilessly as if we’re still in medieval times. Efo was bloody. It was a classic case of instant justice. His crime? The house next door has been a target of serial robberies over the past few months. Vehicles are targeted. On any morning, vehicles parked in the compound could be found vandalized with parts removed—stolen. Efo became a suspect for being young, male, idle, and found at the wrong place—near the entrance of the house on one of those robbery days. With rationality locked in the bosom of anger, Efo was declared guilty—instantly.
Those exacting the penalty on Efo were so blood-thirsty that they could not listen to pleas for mercy. Idle neighbourhood vigilantes judged him guilty away from law enforcement and outside our courts. After receiving death-threatening bruises, and being later allowed to hop away from the scene of brutality and his near-grave, a neighbour finally appeared to explain that Efo couldn’t have been a thief; that he personally knows Efo to suffer from mental illness! A police vehicle came to the rescue later and conveyed Efo to the hospital. End of the story? Well, I don’t know if Efo is still alive. If he is, his troubles are not over because it’s a crime to be mentally ill in the midst of roaming aimless youth.
More questions than answers:
I can’t help but ponder over several questions: What other drama is going to befall my neighbourhood considering the forever increasing hawking population? Where do all these hawkers live since the neighbourhood does not have squatting sites? How far have these youth travelled—from which villages and towns? Where are their parents and guardians? Did their mothers fast, pray to beg God to give them children? Is anyone responsible for them? Is anyone concerned about their whereabouts and wellbeing? If a vehicle knocks them down, who will take responsibility for their care—or funeral?
Who is counting and keeping track of this worrisome phenomenon? What is the rate of increase on a weekly, monthly, annual and decade basis of Ghana’s hawking population? Is any government agency responsible for keeping statistics of this phenomenon or we’re just riding it out until this problem gets completely out of hands (or, is it already out of hands)? What are the sociological and psychological implications of this phenomenon? Are the scholars of Ghana studying it and waking us up to its full implications?
As I write, my guess is that today, a fresh batch of new-entrants to hawking have arrived by the side of a road nearby. How many children are these young people giving birth to? What is becoming of the fate of these street-born children to street youth? I don’t have answers to the above questions.
As to the question of—What do they want?—I do have a solid answer. They want what you, I and we all want: a good piece of Ghana. They want opportunities. They want a better life. They hate to be left behind in dead-end villages for after all, we all have just one life to live. The fact is that if we don’t improve our rural areas, all roads will lead to the cities. In other words, if we don’t take the cities to the villages, the villages will relocate to the cities.
Another question that is eating me up is: Why has the government recently decided to put taxes on condoms? Is the government not aware of Ghana’s population explosion and that as a country, we have no idea how to take care of the sheer number of human beings? Without a doubt, as the population of Ghana continues to increase, the number of street hawkers will also increase. What are we to do with all the surplus people we are producing? Yes, we are all God’s children so deserve to be born but it is a case of national irresponsibility to produce human beings just to watch them grope around the earth like worms, directionless and without hope.
This week, the United Nations marked World Population Day. The focus for this year’s celebration is teenage pregnancy. So as I go up and about in my neighbourhood and see the countless number of young people carrying or holding whatever they have gotten hold off to sell, I just know that Ghana has a big problem. The girl hawkers have little perky breasts germinating from their chests, poking at their tight blouses. Some of the girls in my neighbourhood hawking-gang are pregnant. Who made them pregnant: Their contemporary male hawkers or some irresponsible fun-stealing adults? How about education? What would become of them and their children on the streets?
Why is Ghana populating its land with all these people we don’t have plans for? It is an irresponsible act—beyond measure. The size of Ghana is a finite patch of 238,540 square kilometres land. It’s not much as sizes of countries go. We cannot therefore afford to fill it up indiscriminately and without plans that will work. People are giving birth who have no business giving birth, especially multiple births. Childbirth should not be an all-you-can-generate matter. Just because you’re fertile should be no reason to continue popping up babies as a result of a few careless moments of pleasure.
Ghana, like much of Africa, belongs to the category of high-fertility countries. This means that we give birth ‘by-heart’. We encourage child birth in this culture. Woe unto you if you’re not gifted with the fruit of the womb! You will be looked down upon and stigmatized as if you have a horribly infectious incurable disease. It does not matter whether you have what it takes to care for a child. Fortunately, it is a proven fact that as girls become educated, they delay child birth and the likelihood of having many children.
Unless Ghana plans to encourage a mass relocation of our excess population to the more advanced countries where fewer children are born, continuing to increase our number does not make sense. Methinks we should target the Scandinavian countries that have low-fertility rates. Let’s load some ships and send our surplus people there.
Dr. Doris Yaa Dartey
The WatchWoman Column/The Weekly Spectator
Email: [email protected]