Isaac Mensah’s excuse is not adding up

There is an aspect to the story of the brutal mauling of Ms. Patience Osafo by Police Officer Frederick Amanor that no Ghanaian media operative or establishment is talking about, either because they are not careful observers and critical thinkers or there are simply no formidable sleuthing investigative journalists among the pack. I was made aware of this fact by Mr. Eshen (I let him spell his name for me), a cab driver who plies between the Greater-Accra Metropolis and the Tema Municipality.

It has to do with the fact of legions of banks being on the verge of total collapse. In the process of winding down business, the employees of these banks have resorted to paying their clients and customers according to a process that is strikingly akin to what may be aptly described as “Reverse Triage.”

According to the foregoing process, those clients and customers whom the banks owe the largest amounts of money are first paid off, while small fries like Ms. Osafo are forced to wait on line until the big-time depositors have been paid off. And then at a pace just as lightning fast as these banks had first popped up in our communities and neighborhoods, they vamoose into the proverbial woodwork or thin air, with the small-time depositors left in the lurch to literally chew grass. Mr. Eshen also claims to have suffered the same wicked fate with his wife, the same fate that Ms. Osafo was poised to suffering at the Shiashie, East Legon, branch of the Midland Savings Bank on July 13, when she first appeared at the bank and demanded to have her deposit handed back to her.

The Deputy Managing-Director of Midland, Mr. Isaac Mensah, claims that the Bank started experiencing a massive systems failure or shutdown between July 17 and 19, when the brutal mauling of Ms. Osafo occurred (See “Midland Suspends 5 Workers; to Compensate Woman” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 7/23/18). But the factual reality of the Osafo-Amanor Affair or Cause Célèbre is that the mauling victim had been beseeching the bank to return her life’s savings deposit of a diddly GH? 270 – some news reports put the amount at GH? 290 – since July 13. And so Mr. Mensah needs to explain precisely what the employees at the East Legon branch of Midland were doing, in terms of serving their customers, during the four-day period between July 13, when Ms. Osafo first appeared at the bank to withdraw her life’s savings deposit and was parried off repeatedly, and July 17, when Mr. Mensah claims the bank started experiencing a complete systems shutdown.

Ms. Osafo told a UTV program host, recently, that the bank’s employees had a book in which they had listed the names of all the customers who were seeking to withdraw their deposits from which they capriciously and selectively called out the names of customers whom they decided deserved to be paid. This aspect of the story needs to be promptly investigated in order to enable the general public to fully appreciate the true reason behind the brutal beating of Ms. Osafo. You see, the victim of the brutal trouncing which we all witnessed on social media around the globe says that she was only one among a pack of customers who were rudely being given the run around when her barbaric savaging occurred. She just happened to have been picked upon to serve as a deterrent to the small-fry depositors because she was adamantly determined not to be pushed back and around any further.

On the latter count must also be quickly added that for one week, the little confectionary retailer had not been able to ply her wares in order to make whatever piddling profits she was apt to making regularly to feed her family, which included her own three children and the two-month-old grandchild of a mentally challenged daughter that she was taking care of, and was holding in her arms at the bank when Lance-Corporal Frederick Amanor savagely assaulted her.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York