Why
naked women were flogged
The
former President of Ghana, Jerry John Rawlings, has stated that he tolerated
the public flogging of naked market women during the June 4, 1979 Armed Forces
Revolutionary Council (AFRC) uprising because some of those women threw urine
at his soldiers.
He
added that he ordered the destruction of the Makola Market at the time because
he needed to redirect the anger of the soldiers away from the market women.
Mr.
Rawlings, who was addressing students at the University of Ghana on Friday,
said inasmuch as he was pained by the flogging of the women, he could not have
stopped it because the market women were disrespectful towards the men in green
uniform hence they incurred the wrath of the soldiers.
“You
can’t imagine how pained I was when I will look across and I will see some of
the Makola women being flogged, but I had to tolerate it for a while,” the
former president confessed. “Why do you think that I ordered the breakdown of
Makola? The ‘kalabule’ was so intense; the Makola women were the ones selling
antibiotics, anything. ”
Rawlings
continued: “During that period their hatred against the soldiers was so bad,
soldiers could not go to the elite shopping places like the UTC or Kingsway
then. Soldiers would go and ask for the prices of whatever it is and ask for
reduction and these women would get so angry. ”
“I
think that the toilet facility was so far away so these women would sometimes
urinate in containers where they work and actually throw the piss on the
soldier in his uniform,” he claimed.
“That
was the extent of disdain they had for us. Even Afrifa mentioned a similar
situation not urine, but the contentious situation they were treated before the
1966 coup in his book. ”
Former
President Rawlings also in a characteristic style attacked the Professor John
Evans Mills administration describing it as incompetent for not being able to
get the doctors to call off their strike and get back to work.
“The
politics of how to handle these things are so inappropriate; as if we are so
insensitive as a government, as if we have no confidence in the people…look at
the way and manner they tried to destroy her [Nana Konadu] and destroy me; and
the opposition rather has to come to our defense and building credibility on
the account of it,” Rawlings stated.
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