It is a crispy new day in Ghana

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 15, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

I knew right away, when the penis-chomping incident involving Techiman Municipal Fire Commander Eric Philip Ansah and the young woman whom the alleged victim described as his girlfriend hit the media headlines, that somebody was not tell us the truth. Now, as the Daily Guide tells it, it turns out that the woman who mustered the laudable courage to put Mr. Ansah on sharp notice that sexual harassment will no longer be tolerated in the Ghana Fire Service, in particular, but also Ghanaian society in general, had been persistently and consistently harassed for the four months that she had been working at the Techiman Fire Station as a janitor or cleaner. As of this writing, Ms. Ataa Takyi, whose age had not been given to the public by law-enforcement officers, was on bail while police investigators determined the merits of the case.

Commander Ansah has also been granted a bail bond in the sum of GH? 2,000, while he recovers from his penile wounds and awaits the possibility of a formal indictment and trial, as well as the possibility of permanent severance from his post. So far, though, both parties have been charged with rape, in the case of Mr. Ansah, and causing deliberate harm, in the case of Mr. Takyi (See “Fire Chief Fondled My Breasts – Ataa Takyi” Ghanaweb.com 10/15/16). Indeed, Commander Ansah dug himself into a deep criminal culpability hole, when he told police investigators that he had had sexual intercourse with his collegial subordinate at least four times in the past four months.

Now, four coituses in four months readily exposes Ms. Takyi’s workplace superior as the patent liar here; for about the only way that a supposedly loving couple would have had only four sexual encounters in four months would be in a case where one of the couples, or either one of them, had been away from the other in long intermittent spells. The other possibility would, of course, be in a situation where at least one of the couples was estranged from the other. In this case, it is readily obvious that the real victim here is Ms. Takyi who tells the Daily Guide that when she met Commander Ansah at the Techiman Fire Station, she was already in a serious and loving relationship with another man who had promised to marry her.

Couple the preceding with the fact that it was the alleged culprit, Commander Ansah, who had reportedly forcibly invited himself into the bedroom of Ms. Takyi, and it becomes inescapably glaring that, indeed, it was Mr. Ansah who had invited trouble into his apparently hitherto uneventful existence. Now, what I am not hearing and/or reading enough about are the pontifical voices of those politically heavyweight legally trained rights activist women who promptly went to bat for the members of the infamous Montie-Three Gang, who threatened to sexually violate Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, if the CJ and her Supreme Court associates did not turn a blind eye to widely perceived attempts by the Electoral Commission (EC) to rig Election 2016 in favor of the Mahama regime.

Well, I am making this observation because it is all too evident that rather than being gratuitously charged for causing serious bodily harm to her repeat rapist and would-be rapist, in the latest incident or instance, Commander Ansah’s victim ought to be rather commended and possibly conferred with a state honor to serve as an emulative example for other young women excruciatingly caught in a similar vulnerable situation, on how to take charge and jealously guard and protect the integrity and chastity of their own bodies from unwanted male predators. It is also time for the Donald Trumps of Ghana to responsibly own up to their pathological sexual perversion, promptly seek psychological counseling and comprehensive therapy to help them straighten up their predatory and misogynistic ways and/or tendencies.

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