Mr Price Scandal: Perpetrators must be brought to account
Recently the world learnt via social and mainstream media that three Ghanaian women were degraded and humiliated by staff of South African supermarket franchise, Mr Price at the Accra Mall.
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The women were alleged to have been apprehended shoplifting underwear. As punishment, store security staff forced them to crawl on all fours out of the supermarket, a spectacle for mall patrons. The disturbing, gut-wrenching video and images of the incident have gone viral, and the victims are scarred forever. It is encouraging that the police are investigating the matter, and also that the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection has condemned this distasteful incident.
Without condoning shoplifting, this incident is part of a historical narrative of abuse perpetrated by expatriate commercial establishments in colonial and postcolonial Ghana. These establishments court the business of middle class shoppers, and routinely abuse local lower level staff and persons who do not fit within the target shopper demographic. For these businesses, Ghanaians are not citizens with rights, but rather consumers (and non-consumers), with privileges commensurate with their economic class. And surely, if these three women had been Caucasians, one doubts that they would have been treated in this manner – in postcolonial Ghana.
But then these businesses operate in a context of state regulation, and that is where our authorities have historically been deficient. As citizens, Ghanaians have the right to expect that foreign-owned businesses will treat them with dignity, and that when these businesses fail in their obligations, the government will act on behalf of citizens. This is part of the social contract, which motivates the relationship between citizens and the state.
The expectations for state redress are stronger when there are specialised government institutions with a mandate to deal with the abuse. In this recent case, we are fortunate to have the Gender ministry, which lists the protection of the welfare of women as one of its laudable objectives. However, the Gender minister made her voice heard only after civil society had taken a leadership role in condemning the conduct of the Mr Price staff.
As can be seen from the alarming ongoing saga of the missing babies at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, the Gender ministry seems to be abdicating its responsibilities for matters falling under its jurisdiction to civil society. All the same, the Gender minister’s intervention is better late than never, and she needs our support to remain firm in fulfilling her ministry’s mandate.
Ghana is a constitutional democracy, and subscribes to the rule of law. How can one explain what has been captured on tape and not denied by Mr Price (other than issuing a weak damage management statement promising internal investigations)? Even government officials convicted of misappropriating fantastic amounts of money from the public purse are not subjected to such humiliating treatment as was meted out to the women.
Mr. Price originated in South Africa, where I was privileged to have undertaken graduate studies a decade ago. It is a country where strong citizen activism is typical, fostered by the apartheid experience. If this incident had happened there, we would have been assured of picketing and public boycotts of all Mr Price outlets. It was in that spirit that during the apartheid era, activists the world over organised the boycott of South African businesses.
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As it now stands, every Ghanaian who shops at a Mr Price outlet implicitly endorses the barbaric treatment meted out to the three women. Every Ghanaian who does business at Mr Price affirms that life and dignity in Ghana are cheap commodities, with access restricted only to the wealthiest fraction of our society.
The media must also keep the matter on the public agenda until justice is served. Too often, cases of this nature disappear into thin air, even when the public is assured that the police and bureaucrats are conducting investigations.
This is not a simple case of punishing shoplifters, as some would have it, but rather an affront to our collective dignity, and the perpetrators must be brought to account. The Mr Price affair should be the last of its kind in modern Ghana.
The writer is with the Dept of Communication,
Cape Breton University,
Sydney, Nova Scotia.