What is one to make of this?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 26, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

It is a crime that runs rampant and riotous in Ghana and many other societies, both rich and poor. I am talking about infanticide, the inexcusably callous killing of babies and then dumping their bodies in out-of-the-way places (See “Woman Kills and Dumps Baby in Forest” Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 3/25/16). One comes across such tragic pieces of news events and articles several times a month, more than one would like to. There does not appear to be any end to the commission of such grisly crime in sight. The mother of the strangled, asphyxiated or mutilated baby is often a teenager who clearly does not seem to have been prepared for the sexual encounter that created the dead baby. The biological father of the baby and his role in the life and upbringing of the newly-born baby is almost invariably what determines the ill-fate of the victim.

In the parenthetically referenced case above, the alleged mother of the murdered baby, Maame Efua, is said to be 20 years old. Very likely, Maame Efua has little formal education and viable vocational skills to make a comfortable living, let alone take care of another human. This angle of the tragic narrative of infanticides is often ignored or neglected by many an average Ghanaian media reporter. Media focus, almost invariably, has been on the crime of infanticide, almost to the exclusion of the circumstances that got Maame Efua and her dead baby this far. It is not easy for any mother, irrespective of age and economic status, to kill a baby, unless, of course, some form of dementia or acute desperation is involved in the set of circumstances that precipitated the tragedy. In the case of Maame Efua, and most of the other cases like hers, lack of the requisite familial and societal support may be the major determinant.

A hostile environment may motivate a struggling young mother to commit this most heinous of crimes, which may invariably be reckoned to be the only way out of a harrying socioeconomic situation. As of this writing, the police of Domenase, in the Central Region, were reported to have taken over the case. It was these law-enforcement agents, we are told, whose meticulous investigations led to the grisly discovery. We are told that when Maame Efua led the police to the desecrated spot in the forest, near the village of Potsin, in the Gomoa-East District of the Central Region, the corpse of the murdered baby was badly decomposed, which means that the unnamed three-month-old baby had been dead for at least a couple of days or more. A brigade of red-ants is also reported to have besieged the corpse of the dead baby. They had been feasting on this decomposing organic matter with a vengeance.

Among the Akan-speaking people, there is a maxim that says that “Where one person has died, another may also be finding it hard to sleep.” There appears to be a seamless segue between life and death which, nevertheless, gets turbulently disturbed from time to time as well as traumatizing for the living. It is simply the way of humanity. The nursing mother of a three-month-old baby ought to have been afforded all the necessary help to cope with such a sea change in her life. We are told that it was some members of her community who, finding Maame Efua to be no longer carrying her baby on her back, reported the matter to the police. And so the obvious assumption here is that the young mother may have been orphaned and/or abandoned at an early age. But by whom, it is not clear from the poorly executed news report.

This is also where the Minister for Children and Gender Protection needs to step in, if a legion more Maame Efuas are not to go the same spine-chilling route in the foreseeable future. There needs to be established a community-sensitizing program by the government and other civil society organizations throughout the country if, indeed, Ghanaians do so much care about the lives of the most fragile and vulnerable among us.

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