Armed Robbers And Robin Hood ...

Armed Robbers And Robin Hood: The Owners Of Our Farthing

You would remember Rowan Atkinson, the celebrated British Comedian, as Mr. Bean than Mr. Blackadder, because he succeeded in reducing his brain to the size of a soyabean in the Bean series than in most of his noted epic performances. But, his Blackadder series transcended sheer buffoonery to treat important social issues. In one of them, he is portrayed as a villain who confronts Robin Hood, the Godfather of all thieves, in the Nottingham forest and challenges him on the motive behind his thievery. Could it ever be an act of charity for any patriot to steal from the rich and give to the poor? Robin Hood orders his gang to shoot Blackadder for the interrogation, but his men turn their bows and arrows in his direction and shoot their boss instead, bringing to an end the most notorious robbery gang in old Britain.

This story was fresh in my mind when I went window-shopping last week at the St. Georges shopping centre at Harrow-on-the-Hill, North-West London. I was combing my head for a good introduction to an article I had started the week before, when a young beautiful lady accosted me and woke me up from my sleep-walking. "Sir, have you ever thought of what you will leave in your will for your loved ones? We are from Warren and Warren Solicitors, and we can give you the best professional advice for free."? I didn't know what to make of all that; the fact that the professional advice was the best in the UK or that it was for free. What do I have to bequeath to anybody? Not a farthing. My nephews and nieces would come to learn one day that they had an uncle who spent all his life writing crap in London, and ended up being a real crap living in the crappiest neighbourhood in the UK. May be, they would be able to read a novel or two their uncle left in his library, if they are lucky. Well, at least I am trying to make a Condoleezza Rice out of my eldest niece, to whom I have committed a full-time teacher for intensive piano lessons until she can play Daddy Lumba's Aben Wo Ha at C major. But, I am sure they will be happy to inherit a house or a fleet of cars from their only uncle.

So, if I don't have anything to leave for anybody, even though I have crossed the definitive thirty year threshold, with couple of useless university degrees under my belt, do I consider myself a failure for making my life a jumbled pantomime of mediocrity and confusion? Did I not see how my contemporaries did it? My course mate at university, and in fact, a roommate, owns a good newspaper and is the toast of Ghana at the moment, living the life of a hero in a post-heroic era. Some of my very close friends are living the veritable American dream in Ghana; they have become triumphant capitalists, earning billions in thriving business. They can afford a new Honda CRV nearly every year for their flirtatious concubines. One of them lives like American Rap Mogul P. Diddy: he never wears his underpants the second time; he gets a new one everyday of the year.

So, what do I do to also measure up? I wake up one fine day like everybody else, fill my brain with hard liquor and stuff my nose with cocaine, and go very deep down the underworld to buy a locally made pistol. Next, I scout around to see where those greedy rich men live and turn myself into a cosmopolitan country planner, surveying their coming ins and their going outs, as if I own the very land they walk on. If the survey is successful, I look for other envy-smitten freethinkers like myself, to start our new kind of business that would make us millionaires overnight. We codename the exercise Operation Kwabena Dwomoh, after the name of the rich man we are going to rob. When all is set, we wear condoms on our faces to look like a reincarnated Father Christmas or a hood on our heads to look like African versions of Robin Hood, and proceed to the mansion of Mr Dwomoh to possess his possessions, like God-sent Israelites in the land of the Jebusites.
The operation itself may not have been rehearsed, because thieves are not like ballet dancers who spend a lifetime rehearsing their steps; thieves only come to plunder, and all they need to know are the entrances to a house and the exits. We descend on Mr Dwomoh in the middle of the night when he and his family are asleep, dreaming of when to open the next branch of their business. Suddenly, there is a big bang on the door. It is forced open before Mr. Dwomoh could ask who wants to discuss business that time of the night. Then a group of men pounce on him, demanding where he kept the foreign currency that came in the day before. He is kicked in the groin and slapped in the face if he attempts to explain anything. He is beaten up until they get something tangible to carry home: money, mobile phones, jewelry, including the wife’s wedding ring etc. Next, we grab Mrs. Dwomor, spread open her legs and take turns in a sexual extravaganza before Mr. Dwomoh’s very eyes. If the couple have any virgin daughters, their hymen are brutally ripped before their parents, denying their future husbands the privilege of making the first glorious unforgettable expedition. After that we cart away their booty in the family’s car to live on until the next operation, which could be as early as the next day.
Sometimes, democracy is the very evil that disarms us from dealing with the evils around us. Why should we waste time and money taking armed robbers to court and then to prison, where we would have the additional responsibility of feeding, housing and clothing them forever? The Dwomoh family is scarred for life and would live in constant fear, even if they make thrice the fortune that was taken away. They are compelled to scale down their living to very modest, almost peasant proportions. Where then are the rewards for hard work and decent life? Do we just labour and save for thieves?
If you have not experienced a robbery before, you are not any luckier than Mr. Dwomoh, because you could be the next victim. When I visited Ghana recently, I was horrified at the number of armed robbery cases that were reported in two weeks. In the Brong Ahafo regional capital alone, TYCO, a multipurpose fuel station, was robbed twice by a lone armed robber. He lurks in bushes nearby and pounces on sales girls, brandishing his pistol to frighten everybody. He seizes the day’s sales and vamooses into the bushes. I could forgive my parents when they drove around looking for me whenever I went out in the night. I thought they had overreacted until I learnt of the story the previous month of a Ghanaian-American student, who was robbed and beaten mercilessly by armed thieves. How long can this crude behaviour continue in Ghana?
Recently, there were reports of serious armed robbery on the roads leading to Kumasi from the Sene district in the Brong Ahafo region. The thieves target poor market women traveling to sell their wares in Kumasi. At gun point, they block highways and order passengers to descend from the vehicle. Middle-aged women with babies strapped at their backs, and sometimes very old weaklings, are bullied to lie prostrate while the robbers make away with their valuables. These traders, most of them very poor subsistence farmers, are intimidated to surrender their hard-earned capital in a day to a stranger. They speed off to wherever they can before dawn breaks, and all we would hear later are news reports of the robbery, never their capture.
It is difficult to understand the psychology of robbers. How do Ghanaian born and bred adult men, and these days, teenagers, spend their lives living off the sweat and toil of their hardworking fellow Ghanaians? You would think this kind of activity is foreign to our nature. My Nigerian friends in London tell me that the most intelligent criminals in Nigeria are Ghanaians and Cameroonians. The Ghanaians, they say, are quite unassuming and decent looking, but they are easily motivated by greed to outthink the Nigerians in many high profile crimes. Ours had been a very peaceful country until recently. And now, it is about getting dangerous to live a normal life in some parts of Ghana.
So, how do we deal with armed robbers when they are caught? Nana Nketiah, a London based Chartered Accountant, is uncompromisingly supportive of instant justice and capital punishment. He is outraged that after a seven year sojourn in the UK, learning and working very hard, he cannot confidently send home the things he has always wanted, and hope that they will be his forever. So, if he fancies driving the latest version of a very good automobile, he would have to necessarily deny himself the good fruits of his labour, and settle for something the robbers will not be interested in grabbing. It also follows that he would have to arrange a less glamorous accommodation, if he wants to enjoy a good night’s sleep with his family. Where did hard work go wrong?
Years ago, there were stories that the people of Kumasi were experts at administering instant justice to thieves. They would decorate robbers in lorry tyres, so that every part of their bodies was encased in the tyres. They would rain petrol on the victim and pray Elijah to release hell fire from the heavens, to burn the son of a bitch to ashes. The motive was to deter his accomplices and remind them of what awaits them if they are caught. I don’t know if that treatment changed robbers into born-again Christians. Years later, we heard that rich men in that region had to reserve money in their homes for the robbers, because when they managed to break into a house that looked promising and didn’t get anything to take away, they considered you a waste of their time, and that meant you paid with your dear life. We also heard that pickpockets used sharp objects to make deep marks on the faces of victims who didn’t have money in their pockets.
If we were in the 14th Century, where an eye went for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we could be excused for administering instant justice on armed robbers. After all, anybody who is bold enough to carry arms to rob another might as well be taken for a murderer, even if they don’t succeed in robbing anything. And, what is wrong if you kill somebody who, given the chance, would eliminate you before the law makes an ass out him? But, this is not ancient Babylon, where state institutions were run by the edicts of a King; we are in a democratic dispensation, where publicly approved laws govern our actions and inactions. So, we can’t kill because somebody had wanted to kill. We have to follow due process and wait. But, for how long can we wait while thieves plunder our farthing?