Mystery of the kidnapping of a heavily pregnant woman

This dear country of ours called Ghana is one of the most interesting places in the universe. We discuss issues as if our very lives depend on them, but with time, they pale into insignificance.

Currently trending in homes, offices, market places, farms, chop bars, and every conceivable place is the Anti-Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Queer (Anti-LGBTQ) Bill which is before Parliament.

I am told there are many more letters to the name if you delve further. Some have expanded it to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual (LGBTQIAP).

Growing up, I only knew of homosexual and heterosexual practices. Even then, I thought they were only practiced in the privacy of secluded places and could not be discussed in public.

I never knew that there was something referred to as sexual orientation, until we imported the term from the West, as we are often made to believe that the best comes from the West (not the Western Region). Anyway, as much as I like gossiping about current events, I am not in a position to discuss this one just yet, because I want the legislative body to finish dealing with it before I have my say.

Instead, I want to comment on a different subject, which has now become stale news; the alleged kidnapping of a heavily pregnant woman back in September. Our part of the world woke up to news of the “kidnapping” of a woman carrying a 9-month old pregnancy on 16th September 2021 in the Western Region of Ghana.

The news spread like wildfire because the Western Region had become notorious for kidnappings, whether real or staged, and in some cases ransom demanded.

Some of us are aware that this practice is common in Nigeria, for instance, but to think that our own Ghana has suddenly begun to witness such things has become a matter of concern.

Ghanaians were particularly apprehensive of the case of the pregnant woman because of what reportedly happened to some schoolgirls from the same region. I am, of course, referring to the case of the missing three, or is it four girls, which still remains a mystery till today.

If medical science is to be believed, bones discovered in an uncompleted building were the girls’ remains, so the matter should have been laid to rest. However, some people are still not too sure whether those bones are actually the remains of the victims, given the stories which preceded their discovery.

At a point, we were told the girls had been sent to Nigeria and sold into slavery. Someone even claimed that he saw a vehicle at a filling station around Tema carrying girls who were frantically trying to draw his attention to their Plight before the vehicle zoomed off towards Aflao.

Besides this, as noted already, the Western Region has become notorious for attempted kidnappings, staged kidnappings, faked kidnappings, and voluntary kidnappings.

Be that as it may, the news of the kidnapping of Josephine Panyin Mensah spread across the country like wild bushfire and gained momentum when the kidnappers allegedly demanded ransom before releasing her.

Subsequently, the rumour mill went into complete overdrive. Some said the kidnappers came from La Cote D’Ivoire and had already taken the woman across the border to that country.

Some said the kidnappers had demanded a whopping sum of money and threatened to kill her if their demands were not met within a certain time frame. Some even said she had already been killed. They were all rumours, only rumours. A friend once said that he is not averse to rumours; it is the mongering that irks him.

Amidst all these uncertainties, the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, when it was reported on the 21st September 2021, that the “kidnapped” pregnant woman had been found at Axim, also in the Western Region. However, to add to the mystery, her pregnancy had disappeared.

It was later explained that she had been delivered of her baby, but the kidnappers had taken the child away, whether dead or alive. To feed into the rumour mill, it was speculated that the kidnappers included a midwife or midwives who delivered her of her baby.

Moreover, to muddy things further, it was reported that the woman could not speak due to the traumatic situation she was in and therefore communicated with her rescuer by writing on a piece of paper.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the incident became the talk of the day. The woman is in court, apparently because she admitted that it was all a prank.

I have no intention of discussing the merits or demerits of her case. I am aware that there is an “animal” called contempt of court, which discourages or forbids a case in court from being discussed.

I am going to respect that and abstain from discussing the matter in terms of the guilt or otherwise of the woman as far as the charges levelled against her are concerned.

My favourite journalist, on television, often hastens to admit that he is not a lawyer and then proceeds to give a very intelligent legal argument on the issue being discussed. And he normally has the documents to back his arguments. Love or hate him, he has become the envy of many journalists in the country and a mentor to many young ones.

Like him, I am not a lawyer, but that is not to say that I am a complete ignoramus of law. After all, I studied Military Law for my promotion examinations in the Ghana Armed Forces. I studied Commercial Law for my first degree and the Law of Armed Conflict for my second degree.

So I can be described as a pocket lawyer. However, in place of the wig popularly used by lawyers, I will plead with the Chief Justice or is it the dreaded Ghana Legal Council, to allow me to use a straw hat, which is associated with my part of the country.

When quizzed, I will explain that I was called to the restaurant, not the Bar. Then, I will not be seen as an imposter but a pocket lawyer. I hope permission has been granted, Sir.

Anyway, I want to take liberty out of this situation to discuss the socio-cultural, economic, medical, physiological and political ramifications of what I choose to call “the saga of the alleged kidnapping of a supposedly heavily pregnant woman”.

Let me first dwell on what I may refer to as the fetish of placing too much emphasis on having children. In our Ghanaian culture, six months after marriage, parents and aunties begin to observe the area around the woman’s abdomen for signs of a baby bump. When they see nothing, they clear their throats but say nothing.

By the end of the first year, when they don’t observe any signs, the mother begins to question the son, not the daughter-in-law, what is happening. By the second or third year, the aunties and other distant relations, mostly the females, begin to show concern why there is no child. Woe betides you the lady if, after five years, there is still no child in the marriage.

What they fail to realize is that it is not always the fault of the woman that there is no child. In fact, science has shown that, in most cases, it is actually the fault of the man. Yet the poor woman is often made the scape goat and in some cases, the man is persuaded to go in for a second wife to get a child.

That, perhaps, explains why there have been stealing of babies and, in some cases, buying of babies by some unscrupulous couples, to satisfy that craze. Getting back to Josephine’s case, why would she try to fake a pregnancy, if not to satisfy the expectations of relations? If the narrative is to be believed, even her husband had begun to express his uneasiness about the fact that they had been married for so long without an issue.

We will never know whether her “kidnapping” was going to be the end of the odyssey or there was supposed to be another development. So why all the fuss about children? God in his wisdom, has not made everyone to be fruitful. For those of us into livestock farming, it is not all female animals that are capable of producing younger ones. There are even plants which grow into giant trees without bearing fruits. Come to think of it, in the western world, couples sometimes resolve not to have children.

That is not to say that children are not important, but we should not crucify women for not having children, to the extent of compelling them to fake pregnancies or to acquire children illegally.

Another perspective from which I want to address the issue is the silicon belly the woman allegedly carried till “delivery”. She cleverly took photographs and videos of herself to show the world that she was truly pregnant. That included her husband who must have been fooled for nine months that his wife was expecting. It was reported that by the fourth month, she had ceased to sleep with her husband because she did not want to disturb the growing foetus, which is understandable.

What is not understandable is how he did not see his wife’s bare abdomen for as long as they were living together before she reportedly moved to her mother’s place when the pregnancy was advanced. Using myself as an example, during my wife’s first pregnancy, I used to massage her to sleep. Moreover, it was not unusual for her to come from the bathroom, after a shower, all naked, to enable me assess the development of our baby.

For a prospective father, who had been having sleepless nights because he had no child with his wife, it was rather surprising that he was not obsessed enough, like me at the time, to see his wife’s distended abdomen. These days, when I meet any pregnant woman on the streets, my mind begins to play tricks on me, whether the pregnancy is real or fake.

The other day, I met this beautiful young pregnant woman in church and began wondering whether she was carrying an actual pregnancy or a silicon belly. Do you blame me?

Another interesting angle to the entire scenario was the claim that the woman went jogging on the morning she was abducted or kidnapped. Carrying a 9-month pregnancy, a woman could go jogging at 0500 hrs (5.00am)? That is unbelievable. I am a qualified physical trainer and I have not read or seen anywhere where a woman at the full term of pregnancy can be advised to go jogging in the morning. Bizarrely, she was said to have gone on her morning road run with her anti-natal card, which was taken away by her abductors. Interestingly, some people did not only believe this story but retold it with gusto and defended it with their lives.

Then the very idea of a woman who had just been delivered of a baby walking freely and painlessly beats the imagination. This woman was said to have brought forth and within days, if not hours, the signs of childbirth had disappeared. This is incredible and I expected the women with the experience of childbirth to instantly discredit her story. Was she carrying towels to stem the bleeding after childbirth? How about the exhaustion that accompanies labour? Yet some women were her greatest supporters.

Perhaps the worst reaction to this incident were the demonstrations embarked upon by some people in support of the woman. Admittedly, to this very day, some don’t agree that the woman was not pregnant. Some claim that she only admitted to not being pregnant in exchange for her freedom. They question where she got money to acquire the silicon belly, given the fact that it costs between US$21.00 and US$200.00.

They even quote the figures in Dollars, not Cedis. However, what they don’t know or refuse to acknowledge is that, these days, there are imitation versions of everything or used ones in the market. I served on peacekeeping duties in Cambodia in 1992/93 and what I observed was that one could enter a shop as a private soldier and come out as a General or enter as a Buddhist monk and emerge as a Bishop. Everything was available provided you knew where to go or where to look for it.

That is the case in Ghana today. You can acquire anything; real, imitated or used, provided you know where to look for it. In fact a few days after Josephine’s episode, a poor woman was caught with a fake pregnancy and the photographs on social media showed the fake baby bump. admitted that she was a beggar and was using the fake pregnancy to gain sympathy and solicit alms.

The worse part of the unruliness were the insults heaped on the Western Regional Minister for no reason other than the fact that he was simply doing his job. He was the first person to disclose that the pregnancy was fake and the kidnapping false, for which reason he was not spared the insults. During the demonstrations that followed his intervention, someone reportedly used schnapps and eggs to curse the Minister.

I didn’t blame them initially, because even those who should know better were reportedly lambasting the Minister for speaking up. As is common today, even politicians waded into the matter, giving it all sorts of political interpretations.

Actually, I didn’t begrudge the politicians, who took him to the cleaners, because these days, Ghana has become so polarized that every issue is given a political twist. What surprised me was the role of some journalists, some supposedly senior journalists, who lambasted the Western Regional Minister for disclosing that the woman was not pregnant.

To them, the Police who investigated the matter, should have made the disclosure, not a mere Regional Minister. I beg to disagree with those who hold that view, because the Regional Minister is the political head of the region and every state official in the region works under him and for him. He could choose to update the nation on any development in the region personally or delegate it to any official. It is his prerogative.

I was personally very happy with His Excellency, the President of the Republic’s weekly briefs on the COVID pandemic, when it was at its peak. It showed the importance he attached to it. Sadly, some people trivialized and ridiculed such an exemplary effort.

In the same way, to me, the Regional Minister as the “president” of the region, was at liberty to personally brief the nation or authorize the security agencies to do so.

His explanation that his region had become notorious for fake kidnappings, which they were trying to discourage, was not accepted by some people, but to me, it was very apt. However, in reacting to the attacks, if he actually insinuated that he comes from an elite family in Takoradi, it was uncalled for.

In conclusion, this incident has served as food for thought for the entire Ghanaian populace. That is not to play down on the emerging canker of kidnapping or abduction which is fast becoming a serious security threat. Kidnappings or abductions, whether real or fake, staged or voluntary must be condemned. The world is facing a socio-cultural and economic crisis and Ghana is no exception.

People will do everything and anything, sometimes for silly reasons and mostly to make money, whether fair or foul, good or bad, right or wrong. Girls have reportedly gone to stay with boyfriends and engineered reports that they had been kidnapped or abducted.

Some even connive with their supposed abductors to make money. On 25th October 2021, a 26-year old woman was convicted and sentenced to six months imprisonment for faking her kidnapping with some accomplices to extort an amount of GHS5000.00 from her adopted father. In next-door Nigeria, kidnapping or hostage-taking is serious business, where successful footballers, businessmen, and celebrities are made to pay huge sums of money to free their relatives and loved ones.

Thank God, criminal activities have not reached that level in Ghana. However, let us not delude ourselves that it can never happen here. Everything is possible, especially given the large influx of foreigners, especially illegal immigrants in the country. We, therefore, need to be on our guard at all times.
I shall return.