Robbery On Our Streets?

*By Jean Lukaz

Hardly a day passes without the usual harassment of street vendors touting all sorts of items from newspapers to car accessories to other consumables. A cause of worry is the sale of cigarette and gas lighters, catapults, pocket knives and machettis our streets. Since street robbers started attacking road users with some of these replica pistol-shaped gas lighters, syringes and machettis, scarcely were any of the victims alert as to whether they were being sold the ‘weapon’ or being attacked until…

Ghanaian consumers have always been at the mercy of lax laws or the enforcement of seemingly effective ones. In some advanced countries like Britain, the possession of a knife or any sharp weapon in public is itself a crime let alone touting same in the street for sale.

The Ghana Police Service once warned on the sale of replica gun-shaped objects and toys when armed robbery was on the rise in the country but soon suffered from amnesia, a common disease with law enforcement in Ghana.

So you want to buy a rifle-shaped lighter on the streets with engines of vehicles running. How do you test for product quality? Of course you may need to light it in the midst of petrol and diesel packed street without cognisance of any leaky ones and BOOM! Forget about the fire service and call a water tanker… but both will come in handy.

A machetti peddler approaches your vehicle. You ask how much and he tells you ‘10 million cedis’.

‘You’re mad?’, you ask.

‘No’, comes the reply.

‘Your money or your arm?’

Whew… No time to discern whether he is a street vendor or robber as the sight of your own blood will depict how serious he is.

A syringe-touting street vendor may be an unusual sight but that is definitely a junkie, and not a nurse! You may have a choice between HIV/Aids, your money or your car… No lesser evil here.

How about the recent trend of hitchhikers on our streets? It may not sound like a consumer issue until you have the opportunity of partaking in the hooker experience. An opportunity if you are a sex tourist. A see-through, low neck, low back, low waist line ‘I’m-not-for-sale’ young women desperately in need of hitching a ride to an unknown destination apart from yours are the ones that will be creating a scene when you ask them to get off your vehicle.

‘Pay me or I’ll call my pimps, you dirty b _ _ _ _ _ d!’   

It may be easier to comprehend all these situations if they occur in front of the Psychiatric Hospital. It is rumoured that everyday some of the inmates are released onto the streets to test whether they are back to ‘normal’. Subjectively, all of them will be normal except you, the victim.

The consumer hotlines of the Police are always engaged. These robber-killer-hooker-junkies need them more than you do. So anytime you step out of your home, PLEASE BE A VIGILANT AND DISCERNING CONSUMER!

 

Published in Public Agenda on 16th April 2007: www.ghanaweb.com/public_agenda

*The author is a Consumer Advocate and he can be reached at Http://www.theconsumerpartnership.org