INT’L DIALOGUE: Dying in Lebanon, will Ghana seek justice for Tay?

The deceased, 23-year old Faustina Tay. Photo Credit: Aljazeera

“Umuofia kwenu,” yelled Ogbuefi Ezuego the powerful orator in Chinua Achebe’s legendary novel Things Fall Apart. It was the fifth time the old man had bellowed and the crowd that had gathered at the market-place thunderously responded ‘Yaa!’

The crowd of men, numbering in their thousands, had gathered after they had heard at dawn the gong of the town-crier resounding. The message was simple. That, they ought to meet immediately after the sun had smiled away the grim looks of the dawn.

“Those sons [referring to the people of Mbaino— a nearby community] of wild animals have dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia,” said Ezuego to the teeming crowd.

Chinua Achebe says in that fictionary tale that Ezuego “threw his head down and gnashed his teeth, and allowed a murmur of suppressed anger to sweep the crowd. When he began again, the anger on his face was gone and in its place a sort of smile hovered, more terrible and more sinister than the anger.”

When Ogbuefi Ezuego was done telling the men gathered that their daughter had been gruesomely murdered by miscreants in Mbaino, the men longed for blood as though water to quench their thirst.

So was how the literary wizard captured the confrontation between Umuofia and Mbaino. But, could same be said of the response by Ghana when Aljazeera reported on April 7, 2020, that its daughter— 23-year-old Faustina Tay— had been ‘found dead’ at the basement of the apartment she lived in and served as a maid in Lebanon?

A mysterious death it was!

The said story dubbed “The desperate final days of a domestic worker in Lebanon” says, Ms. Tay had sent Canada-based activist group, This Is Lebanon, messages of the abuse she suffered in the house.

Considering the horrific nature of her death, it should have been enough trigger to spark an uproar in the camp of the cult of human rights groups in Ghana if not among Ghanaians proper. But, hey, there have been an absolute silence on the front of these human rights activists who would ordinarily make ‘noise’ over trivial issues.

Well, perhaps, they are all fighting Covid-19! In Ghana, the news of Faustina Tay’s death struggled to make headlines as only a handful of media outlets carried it on their portals. Similarly, very few people posted or commented on it on social media. It was/is not surprising that the hashtag #JusticeForTay did not fly. Had it been the video of a national security minister modeling in pyjamas for a supposed ‘side-chick,’ traditional media, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook would have had an overflow of commentaries. This is Ghana, a country where we major in the minor and the reverse is true.

Nonetheless, no matter how few the people who are adding their voices in seeking justice for Faustina Tay, the fight for her and many others in Lebanon and other gulf countries must constantly be echoed.

For migration expert, MacDonald K.B. Simpson, as far as poverty continues to torment many in Africa, we will keep hearing and seeing these sort of painful deaths.

“The main culprit [here] is poverty and so to speak, drives people to leave home not at their will. Also, the demand for cheap domestic labour in that part of the world is another cause. The demand for house helps, baby sitters, cleaners and so on is in high demand in the Gulf States and Africa is a fertile ground for such domestic workers,” he said to International Dialogue in email correspondence.

Mr. Simpson says that a single mother with very little education in Ghana who is struggling to make ends meet would be tempted by a ₵1,000 monthly remuneration plus free accommodation in Kuwait, Qatar or Lebanon and do whatever it takes to take that offer.

On Saturday, April 11, 2020, when International Dialogue spoke to a Ghanaian lady living in Lebanon, she echoed same sentiments. This lady— who spoke on condition of anonymity— though educated and enlightened says she could not resist the temptation of being promised [while in Ghana] a monthly salary of ₵1,000 as a maid in Lebanon.

Barbara [not her real name] says she is fortunate to have had a couple [her employers] who somewhat treat her well with the exception that she works 17-19 hours a day with basically no rest. That, there are hundreds of her fellows in Lebanon who are experiencing hell at first hand.

“Most Ghanaian women and other maids here are being severely beaten, intentionally starved for no apparent reason and sexually molested among others,” she said.

MacDonald K.B. Simpson says, “Faustina’s death should be blamed not on her employers alone but the process that sent her there and the poverty she had ran away from.”

Here, the current lockdown in parts of Ghana has exposed the deep divide between the rich and the poor in the West African state. Successive governments have turned a blind eye on this without creatively thinking to uplift the masses from hardship. Even if Ghana had state farms, in of its 16 regions, and employed those Ghanaians who go to serve as maids elsewhere, they would have lived dignified and meaningful lives.   

“On one of my trips back to Ghana a couple of years ago, I met two young ladies on a plane who told me they were domestic maids in Erbil, the capital city of Kurdistan, and that they were going to Ghana for a one  month holiday. Kurdistan! I had never thought Ghanaian women would work there. I was surprised not at the country they were coming from but the story they had told me,” says MacDonald K.B. Simpson.

The hard truth is, we really do not value human lives as Ghanaians and so it hardly crosses our mind to think of how to protect our people abroad. In countries like America, once you are considered a national your safety to the nation is a topmost priority.

What concrete action did we take as a people after Yahya Jammeh and his soldiers freely killed 44 Ghanaians in 2005?

Somewhere last year, at the Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission, Lieutenant Malick Jatta and Corporal Omar A. Jallow said that the Ghanaians were executed by the “Junglers” squad on the orders of Mr. Jammeh.

A Ranking Member of Ghana’s Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, after the Jallow confession said at the floor of parliament that government must reopen probe into the gruesome killings. This, we are yet to know whether the probe has been reopened.

However, if it is lack of commitment on the part of government, the Ghanaian media should not be slacking too. Rather, it should be fronting campaigns to get justice for such slain and abused fellows.

What the Ghanaian media must know is that it is shameful to report on an issue once and go to sleep. After the media reported on the killing of investigative journalist Ahmed Suale, it went to bed only to come back to it on the occasion of his one year anniversary. Currently, there is no news on the journalist. We will only see and hear the media at next year’s anniversary when it will be calling the police and the Ghana Journalists Association among others on ‘how far’ the investigations have gone. Can we be serious a little?

Today, it is Faustina Tay and we must not, yet again, remain silent! This is the right time for the militant feminists— the so called gender activists— to rise and fight for their own.

These gender activists must join some of us in telling the Lebanese government to abolish the Kafala [sponsorship] system. Under this system, a migrant domestic worker’s legal status is solely in the hands of their employers.

The sad reality is that, one could easily become illegal migrant should the employer terminate their contract. And the most worrying part of this law is where these employers are free to seize the domestic workers’ passports. Who does such a thing in this modern era?

The African Union must rise and engage the Lebanese government over these abuses against domestic workers as it is not only Ghanaians suffering this fate.

“On Tuesday, November 5, the 20^th day of the ongoing uprising in Lebanon, an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Beirut arrived at Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport. [In] its cargo was seven dead bodies of Ethiopian domestic workers who had died in Lebanon,” says Lebanese writer and researcher Joey Ayoub in an opinion piece on Aljazeera’s website in November 2019.

The government of Ghana must as well dispel the fears of many including Fraud and Security Consultant Richard Kumadoe over the seeming inactiveness of the country’s security services to clamp down on persons who lure our women to slavery in the Gulf countries.

“I guess and suspect that the [security] agencies have gone to sleep,” says Mr. Kumadoe to International Dialogue, “so, it’s time to wake them up to take their positions and to discharge their responsibilities in curtailing the widespread of human trafficking especially Ghanaians to other countries.”

People who lure these women to Lebanon and such places are engaged in a subtle form of human trafficking. This, we must admit and act swiftly. Barbara— the maid in Lebanon— says they were smuggled through the Kotoka International Airport. They did not go through the laid down checks every passenger goes through. She did not even have the yellow fever pass!

May the soul of Faustina Tay find a peaceful rest. And may we not relent on our effort to seek justice for her. As to whether she was murdered or she committed suicide, the bottom line is that we now know there was an existing threat on her life by her employers.

Can we let #JusticeForTay trend till something substantial is achieved?

The writers are international journalists who have interest in the world’s politics with an unflinching eye mainly on what pertains in Africa. Views expressed here are solely theirs and do not, in anyway, reflect the editorial policy of this media organisation.

Email: internationaldialogue2@gmail.com

Twitter: @abisolo7 & @aniwaba

INT’L DIALOGUE: Africa in the midst of Covid-19. Will the centre hold?

Coronavirus test kit

When we heard that the most dangerous disease in the world now was ravaging China – Wuhan in particular, it seemed too far a place to catch up with us here in Africa. Then, like a smothering fire on a refuse dump the deadly coronavirus burrowed through the globe – not exempting Africa – as though a fox finding a way into the side walls of a hill.

This, for months now, all media outlets across the globe have majored in one thing. The reportage on the coronavirus also referred to as Covid-19. From business to sports, entertainment to fashion and what have you, Covid-19 trends in all spheres till today. 

In Lombardy, Italy, for instance, the real ‘horror movie’ being filmed as thousands of humans fall flat on the knife of Covid-19 breaks hearts. Also in Spain, the disease keeps punching hard the throat of anyone it comes into contact with that even morgues have ran out of space.

“The first hearse arrived on Tuesday at Madrid's ice rink, hastily transformed into a makeshift mortuary as Spanish authorities scrambled to deal with a rising death toll from the coronavirus,” wrote Aljazeera in a news article on March 24, 2020.

Experts say, the elderly – probably because of compromised immune system – are the main casualties in the hands of the invisible soldiers defeating any military the world has known. Of the many claims by these medical experts, none really thrilled Africans initially as the notion that the virus cannot withstand Africa’s hot weather!

In Ghana, some medical doctors and nurses who joined this propagation of the hot-weather gospel were the very ones who took to their heels when a suspected case of the disease was first reported at the hospital.

Whereas there could be truth in this hot-weather assertion, what makes most Africans and the world at large fear for Africa – in the face of Covid-19 ­– is the weak health institutions on the continent. This, the World Health Organisation [WHO] itself sent a strong warning to the continent to prepare for the worse.

WHO’s head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva that Africa must “wake up.” Gripped by fear, Mr. Adhanom – an Ethiopian – reiterated his clarion call saying, "Africa should wake up, my continent should wake up."

The reality is that, it is not only the head of the World Health Organisation who is concerned about Covid-19 gruesomely ravaging Africa if it [the disease] manages to break loose on the continent. Indeed, with an already fragile healthcare system across Africa, which is highly manifested in how its leaders [political elites] run to seek for medical treatment abroad, the question as to whether Africa is really prepared for the pandemic constantly lingers on the minds of many.

One needs not consult prophets and sorcerers for an answer to this simple question. No! Africa is not prepared today or even in 100 years from now for any of these diseases [not forgetting what Ebola did]. Yes! While the developed, the developing and the underdeveloped world are overwhelmed by the power of Covid-19, without any argument, the most vulnerable of these categories of the world is Africa.

In Africa, basic resources and facilities such as isolation centers, ventilators, testing kits are often as hard to come by as searching for snow in hell. If even nose masks are not that simple to come by, to talk of the issue of inadequate medical personnel to handle the medical needs of the people on the continent is a nonstarter.

As of Monday, March 30, 2020, the continent of Africa had recorded 3,242 confirmed cases of the disease with 69 deaths and 130 patients recovered. The various heads of state had put in plans to contain the spread of the disease. However, the saddest reality is that these ‘plans’ were not enough. In Ghana and most other African countries, it all appears that the old age culture of begging for alms was at its best. So, when Chinese billionaire Jack Ma offered to donate some protective gears to the continent, an ode was sung to his glory.

‘“We are now properly prepared,’ Mr Agyemang-Manu [health minister] declared while receiving a consignment of assorted protective gears donated by the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma which arrived in the country Wednesday morning from Ethiopia,” said the Ghanaian news portal 3news.com.

The West African state was not ‘properly prepared’ until Jack Ma came to the rescue? This is a country that has for years touted its possession of gold, diamond, bauxite and arguably any other mineral you could think of. Ghana, again, boasts of timber. This we all know and the sort of timber the country has goes beyond mahogany and such tress. The all expensive rosewood is found in Ghana too!

But, the single most important question is that where does the money accrued from sale of all these natural resources go? Greed, corruption and politics without conscience have been gradually eroding the fortunes of this beautiful West African state. Not long ago, the country’s gold and rosewoods were plundered without mercy by Chinese nationals and Ghana could not even cough at them.

After all that Aisha Huang – nicknamed the galamsey/[local parlance for illegal mining] queen, mercilessly did in the mining sector, she was eventually deported to go and sin no more while Ghanaians who were also caught in the same act are still behind bars.

That was not all. Another Chinese national by name Helena Huang was also let off the hook of the country’s laws after she was arrested with four containers of rosewood and eventually deported. In Helena’s case, she even went missing for days in Ghana, after first being arrested, only to submit herself to the police later on.

Away from Ghana to Equatorial Guinea, in Central Africa, a handful of politicians there have for years lived lavishly at the expense of the country’s poor. In the country where a father – Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo – serves as the president, and his son Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue as the vice president, issues of embezzlement there are now no news to the world.

Since October 2011 to date, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue has countlessly dominated headlines all for the wrong reasons. From the US seizing his $70 million assets to authorities in Brazil confiscating over $16 million worth of cash and luxury watches, Mr. Nguema has proven notoriously stubborn.

“An appeal court in France has fined Equatorial Guinea's vice-president €30m ($33m; £25m),” reports the BBC in February 2020, “for using public money to fund his lavish lifestyle.”

If one means touching on states of Africa one by one to talk about mismanagement of funds and resources, such a fellow would probably need a whole year to do so. It is therefore not surprising that many fear for Africa over Covid-19. All the monies on the continent are in the pockets of some few powerful men [and women] who effortlessly seek proper medical care abroad leaving their health system, back home, in disarray.

 

It is true that almost all the advanced/developed world are as well struggling to sufficiently provide all the needed equipment to contain the disease. In a CNN news article dubbed “The US is asking other countries for everything from hand sanitizer to ventilators to help fight the coronavirus,” the piece said America had asked for such assistance in the face of the threat of the disease.

This, many people shared on social media and made fun of a struggling giant – America. The question that most Africans who shared this post did not ask themselves is would any country in Africa or the continent proper have survived had it recorded the number of cases [145,369 as of midday, Monday, March 30, 2020] of the disease America has?  

Perhaps, the saddest thing here is how these Africans [especially the youth] are not able to question their own leaders of mismanagement of state resources but take delight in what happens elsewhere. Renowned writer, Wole Soyinka was not far from right when he said: “It is only in Africa where thieves will be regrouping to loot again and the youths whose future is being stolen will be celebrating it.”

In these trying times of Covid-19 ravaging the world, we have seen the serious and non-serious countries around the world. Whereas others could dish their hands into their coffers to give stimulus packages to businesses and citizens, many are those who ran to the International Monetary Fund to beg for funds to do same.

Whereas some used six [6] to 10 days to build a 1000 bed capacity hospital, others only got ‘properly prepared’ after a billionaire somewhere donated protective gears to them. And the mere thought that these non-serious countries are not really poor but corruption and greed placing them in helplessness pains so badly as the sting of an ant.

We can only continue to pray for Africa for the center can never hold should Covid-19 properly torment the continent. The truth is, if we should be in the shoes of Italy or Spain for just a day, dead bodies will carpet our streets!

The writers, Solomon Annan & Solomon Mensah, are Ghanaian journalists who have interest in the world’s politics with an unflinching eye mainly on what pertains in Africa. Views expressed here are solely theirs and do not, in anyway, reflect the editorial policy of this media organisation.

Email: internationaldialogue2@gmail.com

Twitter: @abisolo7 & @aniwaba

INT’L DIALOGUE: Faure Gnassingbe, a president for life?

 

President Faure Gnassingbe. Photo: Culled from the internet

Saying it succinctly without any malice or whatsoever attached, he who is really pressed to empty the contents of their bladder could do so by urinating to easily plot the coordinates of the West African state’s borders at a go. Togo, per its land size, is one of the smallest countries in Africa. 

If it would not be considered wild-dreaming, Togo’s populace could be counted within a split of a second by one of those marvelous Chinese drones that it [China] uses to warn its citizens who loiter about in town without nose masks in the midst of the deadly Coronavirus. Indeed, Togo’s population of a little over eight [8] million is but a handful. 

Nonetheless, the smallness of everything Togo cannot be said of the plethora of issues within the country which shares boundaries with Ghana and Benin.

“Faure Gnassingbe seized power in 2005 by a coup following his father’s death. Thanks to the army that maintained his father in power for 38 years,” rants Farida Bemba Nabourema, “in the aftermath of that coup, he held rushed presidential elections and over 500 Togolese citizens were massacred in the process. His ascension to power was not democratic and so has been his ruling of Togo.”

Ms Bemba Nabourema, the Spokesperson for the Faure Must Go movement, in a mail correspondence with International Dialogue sounded much worried. 

“Under Faure Gnassingbe’s regime, laws have been enacted to ban protests, limit freedom of the press and speech. Multiple media houses have been shut down, journalists have been persecuted, arrested and tortured and numerous citizens including children as young as nine [9] have been summarily executed during protests. This situation has caused thousands of Togolese to flee their country and live in exile like myself,” she said.

Getting a proper definition or description for Faure Gnassingbe’s rule/regime is one difficult question political commentators and students of international politics could ever face. Is Mr. Gnassingbe practicing democracy or monarchy? If we are to go by the former as we are made to believe then why his obvious attempt to cling on to power as tightly as a baby would its mother’s breast? 

Since the ascension of Mr. Gnassingbe to the throne of presidency, a series of protests by the opposition political parties have rocked his seat. But with the military’s unwavering support on his side – as alluded to by Bemba Nabourema,  he has survived all attempts to end the over fifty years rule by the Gnassingbe family. Yes! Welcome to Africa where often politics becomes a do-or-die affair.

Faure Gnassingbe has perfected his craft so well that he could not have skipped or missed adopting the bully-boy tactics of his late father. 

Somewhere in May 2019, Togo’s parliament accepted into being a constitutional amendment that gives the president two five-year terms. 

The amendment means that Faure Gnassingbe is very much eligible to stand for reelection in the country’s polls slated for February 22, 2020. But, wait! That’s not all. Faure Gnassingbe could as well stand for the 2025 elections and rule till 2030 when he wins the people’s mandate.

For Farida Bemba Nabourema, however, she believes that this constitutional change “is a mockery to the people of Togo who were one of the first to vote for terms limit on the African continent in 1992.” 

The young woman in exile says, Faure Gnassingbe does not plan on ruling Togo till 2030. That, rather, he wants to be president for a lifetime like his father. And if he manages to stay till 2030, he will find a way to modify the constitution just like his father did in 2002 and rule till he dies.

Writing under the headline “Togo changes law to let president stand for two more terms” on May 9, 2019, Aljazeera’s news report appeared to have cemented the fears of many who dread Faure Gnassingbe.

“Another change passed by the National Assembly guaranteed immunity for life to all former presidents, who the new constitutional terms said cannot be prosecuted, arrested, detained, or tried for acts committed during their presidential term,” the report said.

With a parliament that is fully controlled by members of Gnassingbe’s Union for the Republic party as they hold two-thirds of the seats in the house, do we really expect anything different than what we are seeing?

“Legislators also changed the rules for their own mandate, meaning they can now hold their seats for two terms of six years each. Before, they had a mandate of five years but with an unlimited number of terms,” wrote Aljazeera.

Faure Gnassingbe has the military and the country’s parliament among others on his side making his rule unquestionable. 

In the said February 22 presidential election, nevertheless, 53-year-old Gnassingbe will face it off in that contest of thumbs mainly with Jean-Pierre Fabre.

Mr. Fabre who leads the Alliance for Change [ANC] which is the main opposition party in the country has a huge task at hand. A task as enormous as uprooting the taproot of an iroko tree and Pierre Fabre perfectly knows he must not do so with a shovel. 

Will Jean Pierre Fabre be able to unseat the iroko tree of a man called Faure Gnassingbe? Or, are we faced with a difficult yet an easy question as George Bernard Shaw once said, “No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious”?

Well, undoubtedly, Togo’s presidential polls has a lot of interesting tales at stake. For professional bettors and those whose conscience does not restrict them from betting, you may place a bet on the elections and boldly tell Aliko Dangote to watch out as you would whisk from him – the way the hawk does mother hen's offspring – his position of Africa’s richest. 

At this point, we can only wish the good people of Togo a peaceful election and urge the international community to be that interested in Gnassingbe's country. Here, Ghana’s president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo must be lauded for his recent mediation role when Togo’s opposition parties locked horns with the Faure Gnassingbe’s regime.

The African Union proper must be up to the task. It must not comment on the affairs of a member state only to return to comment on same in a decade’s time. 

The writers are Ghanaian journalists who have interest in the world’s politics with an unflinching eye mainly on what pertains in Africa. Views expressed here are solely theirs and do not, in anyway, reflect the editorial policy of this media organisation.

Email: internationaldialogue2@gmail.com

Twitter: @abisolo7 & @aniwaba