Hawkers at Nima police station
Amnesty International (AI) has appealed to government to create more market space for hawkers.
The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has been battling hawkers for some months in Accra, and the media have reported violent encounters between the two. Multiple arrests have been reported and some hawkers have been sentenced to jail.
AI Ghana Director, Lawrence Amensu said hawkers, who are mostly women, should be treated humanely while being removed from the streets.
“We are aware that people are selling where they aren’t supposed to be selling on the streets,” he added.
He said traffic congestion offers hawkers easy access to customers and that the city shouldplan alternate market spaces to compensate.
“When you don’t plan for these market spaces, people will decide to come to the centre city.”
Mavis kwesi, a 15-year-old hawker working at Nima, said she prefers the streets over markets.
“We don’t want to sell in the market,” she emphasized. “We need money to attend school.
We have finished JHS and need money for SHS.
“I’m selling water to become someone in future to take good care of my parents,” said Sandra Dakwaa, 14, another Nima hawker.
“I don’t want my life to be miserable. As for the markets, they are always having disagreements and we don’t want to join.”
The AMA Acting Public Relations Officer was unfazed by their plight, stressing that the hawkers trade in the middle of the roads, some of which are under construction, and so must be moved. Nor was he sympathetic to the call for additional market space.
“When people are selling in the middle of the road, what options are we supposed to give them?” asked Numo Blafo III, adding that there are already 42 markets in the metropolis.
And they don’t want to be in the markets.”
Despite all this, Amensu maintains that Ghana is open to human rights work.
He described the relationship of the organisation with the government of Ghana as positive.
“We are very lucky,” he said.
“The government is very open to criticism. When we have campaigns and events, we invite the government.”
AI outlined a number of past and present campaigns in Ghana, including one which culminated in the passage of the Domestic Violence Act, which seeks to protect women in the home.
“We play a large role in ensuring that women’s rights are observed, that domestic violence is totally uprooted, although the fight has not yet been won.”
He also spoke about human rights violation embedded in some traditional practices throughout the country. In some traditions, when a husband dies, the wife is suspected.
“Widows are stripped naked and made to sit in ants,” Amensu said. “When the ants bite and the woman cries out, it is believed she killed her husband.”
Another practice, called sister in bed, involves young girls who are coerced into sleeping with their cousins, so that they might produce a male child in an all-girls family.
AI first visited Ghana in 1962, a trip that comprised the first of its international research.
In the 70s, AI opened a branch in the country and there are now 8,000 members of the organisation.
“We promote human rights and we speak against violations of human rights,” he said.
“And we empower people to know their rights and we ensure that people know rights have responsibilities.”
The idea for AI started when two Portuguese men in a drinking bar clicked their glasses and cheered for freedom. This was during an oppressive period in Portugal, and the two men were arrested and soon forgotten. Their ideas of freedom, however, were later resurrected by a British lawyer, Peter Benenson. AI was formed in 1961.
By Juliet Buntuguh and Paul Carlucci