The number of young people who sell by busy roadsides has increased. I know so because at the beginning of this week, during a short period of one hour, I counted 638 youth hawkers alongside two major streets in Accra.
Twelve weeks ago (September 24) when I last conducted this count of the teeming number of youth hawkers during the same time (9 to 10 am) on the same two principal street corridors (Emmanuel Eye Clinic through Tettey Quashie Interchange to Liberation Circle, and from GBC through Kwame Nkrumah Circle to Obetsebi Lamptey Circle), the number stood at 489. But on Monday, December 14, the number had increased to 638, showing a whopping 30.47percentage increase.
To my surprise, for this week’s count, there were ten percent more girls than boys. In the last count, gender was not segregated so they were all counted together. A hawker was just a hawker; not male or female youth hawker. But gender counts. With all the money this country has spent on girl-child education campaigns, to count 361 female youth hawkers (51.58 percent) as against 277 (46.42 percent) male youth hawkers might be an indication of a failure in policy implementation.
Why am I counting? Putting a number to a phenomenon helps to gain a firmer grip over that phenomenon and move it from the fussy realm of vague description to the concrete realm of figures. For instance, to a casual observer from the comfort of moving vehicles, it might seem obvious that the number of hawkers on our streets continues to increase. But when you ask those who should know, “how many hawkers do we have?”, the response is ‘aaahhh’, meaning, ‘we don’t know’. So periodically, this column will conduct a rudimentary social science research of counting. Soon, stories of individual street hawkers will also be told.
In a lecture delivered to the Indian Parliament, the Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank fame, said: “Poor people are like bonsai trees. When anyone plants the best seed from the tallest tree in a tiny flower pot, he will get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed planted, only the soil-base that was given it was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people.”
The children who are hawking an array of odd products on our streets are our ‘bonsai people’; we will get out of them in future what we are planting in them today. There is nothing inherently wrong with the youth who have by default, taken to street hawking. They are our ‘internally displaced persons’ who hover around looking for opportunities, any opportunities! It’s amazing that we don’t have more armed robbery than we have today.
As a country, whatever we’ve been doing about the youth question is clearly not working. A smart person once said that it’s only a fool who does the same thing over and over again even when he/she gets the same results.
The 30 percent change might indicate a Christmas shopping season increase or it might be part of a trend. But if more young people moved to the cities in the past few weeks to become hawkers during Christmas, what’s the guarantee that they would all return to their hometowns after the buying/selling season? If business was lucrative for them on this initial trip, why would they return? In March, I’ll conduct another count and bring you the results as we track this disturbing phenomenon.
If I were a young girl growing up right now in any part of Ghana, knowing very well that my education will not take me anywhere of substance, or that my education will render me illiterate, I would by now have packed a couple of my tight skirts and stained fashionable-in-my-eyes-only blouses and headed to the bright city lights of Accra, Kumasi or Takoradi. I would have been strategic and settled on Sekondi/Takoradi where business is poised to become more brisk when crude oil will flows.
According to Elie Wisel, a holocaust survivor, indifference is both tempting and seductive. “It is so much easier to look away from victims….. to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. …for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbours are of no consequence….their lives are meaningless.” Through indifference, therefore, we blur the boundaries between the sacred and the profane in the face of our super-Christian pretentiousness. Especially so!
This phenomenon of youth hawkers should be abnormal; yet, it has become so normal to see young people of any age chasing after moving vehicles to sell just about anything; so normal that we just look away. Social welfare has gone to the dogs, and trampled over, crushed into nothingness. We, by default, commit the sin of indifference.
At Christmas time, the season of waiting for the redemptive birth of Jesus the Christ, the offspring of privileged folks would see and live joy, unencumbered with the burden of chasing after cedis and pesewas. From which armpit of Ghana do these youth hawkers come from? Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to associate a name, a hometown, parents, circumstances and a life story to each of these young people, some of whom are barely removed from childhood?
These are our ‘bonsai trees’ who in full exposure to the tropical elements of hot sunshine, torrential rainfall and windstorms but especially, at the peril of vehicular traffic, work in hazardous, menacing, demeaning and excruciating endeavours as professional hawkers.
Some people come into this world with silver, even golden spoons stuck in their tender mouths. Some enter by edging their way through the backdoor as if just to take a peek at life, to check out if there’ll be a place for them out here under God’s sun. When, after crawling around here for awhile, like worms, bumping their ‘eyeless’ heads on walls at each blind turn, they leave, exhausted, a puree of want and despondency. This reality might explain why the cemeteries might be full of unfulfilled ex-people; people who left no evidence behind that they ever touched down on planet earth.
Some people get nothing from life and to some extent, expect nothing. But shouldn’t they be entitled to something, especially when they enter the world by way of a country that has something? That something includes our gold, diamond, timber, the billions of dollars of loans contracted from ‘development partners’ and others on behalf of ‘we the people’ and for which no account is given to the populace. Who is responsible for protecting such people from themselves and from the painful grind of poverty? Who and where are the elders of this town?
Postscript: A confession. This was a difficult article to write. I cried. I struggled to hold back my tears over the sin of indifference we are committing over our youth. Reader, while you merry over Christmas, (a celebration Jesus would not recognize as his birthday), have space for outrage over the phenomenon of Ghana’s ‘bonsai trees.’
To my surprise, for this week’s count, there were ten percent more girls than boys. In the last count, gender was not segregated so they were all counted together. A hawker was just a hawker; not male or female youth hawker. But gender counts. With all the money this country has spent on girl-child education campaigns, to count 361 female youth hawkers (51.58 percent) as against 277 (46.42 percent) male youth hawkers might be an indication of a failure in policy implementation.
Why am I counting? Putting a number to a phenomenon helps to gain a firmer grip over that phenomenon and move it from the fussy realm of vague description to the concrete realm of figures. For instance, to a casual observer from the comfort of moving vehicles, it might seem obvious that the number of hawkers on our streets continues to increase. But when you ask those who should know, “how many hawkers do we have?”, the response is ‘aaahhh’, meaning, ‘we don’t know’. So periodically, this column will conduct a rudimentary social science research of counting. Soon, stories of individual street hawkers will also be told.
In a lecture delivered to the Indian Parliament, the Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank fame, said: “Poor people are like bonsai trees. When anyone plants the best seed from the tallest tree in a tiny flower pot, he will get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed planted, only the soil-base that was given it was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people.”
The children who are hawking an array of odd products on our streets are our ‘bonsai people’; we will get out of them in future what we are planting in them today. There is nothing inherently wrong with the youth who have by default, taken to street hawking. They are our ‘internally displaced persons’ who hover around looking for opportunities, any opportunities! It’s amazing that we don’t have more armed robbery than we have today.
As a country, whatever we’ve been doing about the youth question is clearly not working. A smart person once said that it’s only a fool who does the same thing over and over again even when he/she gets the same results.
The 30 percent change might indicate a Christmas shopping season increase or it might be part of a trend. But if more young people moved to the cities in the past few weeks to become hawkers during Christmas, what’s the guarantee that they would all return to their hometowns after the buying/selling season? If business was lucrative for them on this initial trip, why would they return? In March, I’ll conduct another count and bring you the results as we track this disturbing phenomenon.
If I were a young girl growing up right now in any part of Ghana, knowing very well that my education will not take me anywhere of substance, or that my education will render me illiterate, I would by now have packed a couple of my tight skirts and stained fashionable-in-my-eyes-only blouses and headed to the bright city lights of Accra, Kumasi or Takoradi. I would have been strategic and settled on Sekondi/Takoradi where business is poised to become more brisk when crude oil will flows.
According to Elie Wisel, a holocaust survivor, indifference is both tempting and seductive. “It is so much easier to look away from victims….. to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. …for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbours are of no consequence….their lives are meaningless.” Through indifference, therefore, we blur the boundaries between the sacred and the profane in the face of our super-Christian pretentiousness. Especially so!
This phenomenon of youth hawkers should be abnormal; yet, it has become so normal to see young people of any age chasing after moving vehicles to sell just about anything; so normal that we just look away. Social welfare has gone to the dogs, and trampled over, crushed into nothingness. We, by default, commit the sin of indifference.
At Christmas time, the season of waiting for the redemptive birth of Jesus the Christ, the offspring of privileged folks would see and live joy, unencumbered with the burden of chasing after cedis and pesewas. From which armpit of Ghana do these youth hawkers come from? Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to associate a name, a hometown, parents, circumstances and a life story to each of these young people, some of whom are barely removed from childhood?
These are our ‘bonsai trees’ who in full exposure to the tropical elements of hot sunshine, torrential rainfall and windstorms but especially, at the peril of vehicular traffic, work in hazardous, menacing, demeaning and excruciating endeavours as professional hawkers.
Some people come into this world with silver, even golden spoons stuck in their tender mouths. Some enter by edging their way through the backdoor as if just to take a peek at life, to check out if there’ll be a place for them out here under God’s sun. When, after crawling around here for awhile, like worms, bumping their ‘eyeless’ heads on walls at each blind turn, they leave, exhausted, a puree of want and despondency. This reality might explain why the cemeteries might be full of unfulfilled ex-people; people who left no evidence behind that they ever touched down on planet earth.
Some people get nothing from life and to some extent, expect nothing. But shouldn’t they be entitled to something, especially when they enter the world by way of a country that has something? That something includes our gold, diamond, timber, the billions of dollars of loans contracted from ‘development partners’ and others on behalf of ‘we the people’ and for which no account is given to the populace. Who is responsible for protecting such people from themselves and from the painful grind of poverty? Who and where are the elders of this town?
Postscript: A confession. This was a difficult article to write. I cried. I struggled to hold back my tears over the sin of indifference we are committing over our youth. Reader, while you merry over Christmas, (a celebration Jesus would not recognize as his birthday), have space for outrage over the phenomenon of Ghana’s ‘bonsai trees.’
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