Dark Tourism in Ghana: A Pathology of Consumer Protection

By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS

Yesterday a family of nine was kaput from eating contaminated food. Well, call it food poisoning, suicide, homicide, or consumercide, the culprit this time was food that was injurious to health and unfit for consumption and the victims are already dead.

When consumers die from food poisoning, the culprits go free...it is a dog’s world. Anytime the cause of death is food-centered, authorities in Ghana seem to play a certain kind of music reminiscent of the world of ‘let the dead bury their dead’…life is so cheap, who cares? All deaths from food poisoning are treated as if they are cases of cholera: the cause is in the corpse. Like Thomas Hobbes observed on the effects of rationalization, “

men have undertaken to kill their kings… provided before he do it he call him tyrant. For they say not regicide, that is, killing of a king, but tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant, is lawful.” [LEVIATHAN, XXIX].

School children die from food poisoning and the traceable food vendor is back the next day to sell and kill more kids: business as usual. It is much less disconcerting to take credit for having a reducing balance formula for number of deaths caused by food poisoning as the years go by in order to show how we are improving.

In a country, where imported vehicles that have been declared not road worthy in the originating countries, after being involved in motor accidents, are a luxury and are free from legal encumbrances, deaths from motor accidents caused by defective vehicles bearing tested and passed license plates instead of ‘DV’ number plates do not receive much attention. Grim and gory photographs of motor accident deaths are a big sell for newspapers because we have grown to become thana-tourists of our bereaved existence.

Just stand by the roadside each morning and watch soon-to-happen disasters: school children being transported in smoking and decrepit buses like bags of rice packed on top of each other destined for quasi-luxury private schools and ask yourself who really do not care…PARENTS! And they will blame the government for lack of regulation when the former have got brains, eyes and two feet to vote with.

Do we have to go far? Presidential campaigners fall through a constructed platform right in camera and they become a laughing stock. See who’s laughing out loud? The contractor! Party goers die from food poisoning and it is ungrateful to take on the irresponsible host for sending you to your grave earlier than you pretended. When you go unlucky with fake medicines, it was a clinical trial gone badly and that makes it legally sound as a dose for those who need to cleanse their consciences from cognitive dissonance.

A case of CAVEAT EMPTOR --let the buyer beware—consumers in Ghana have long remained pawns on the chessboard of Consumer Protection.

Pathology is a branch of medical science that studies the causes and nature and effects of diseases including evidence of mentally disturbed conditions but this consumer disease does not need be diagnosed by autopsy since the causes of death are not in the corpse but are rather staring in our faces daily. Thanatology, the branch of science that studies death has become our social diet.

And as if we love the dead more than the living, there always seems to be more money to be made through funerals than through christenings, even if there is no insurance money to be claimed. This is forensic evidence that our nation Ghana has gone pathologically mad again…only short footbridges to cross from gastronomy to pathology to thanatology and we are the new living tourists seeking thrills from the dead.