GENERAL NEWS

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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