Missing in a society that is indifferent

Atinka Television in Ghana has been making important revelations. It has been listing missing persons in Ghana and what that Pandora’s Box bears is horrific, to say the least. Persons in all age brackets go missing without a trace, some as long as 10 years or more. The missing in Ghana might be a minority group that only exists in absentia but their ranks are growing.

Making announcements about the missing with their photos, their relatives have mentioned how it all happened and these may be crystalized into two. Those who notified someone in the households of their intentions to step out but did not return. Some simply disappeared and are not traceable.

The non-existent communication line is aggravated when one considers the small percentage of the numbers that suffer hearing and speech impairments. How are the deaf and dumb going to express themselves in the event they stray by themselves or are abducted, to bring their plight to attention? It is also known that the aged who are in a state of schizophrenic paranoia can also go astray.

Well, some beautiful ladies had gone missing only to be found in the comfortable care of men. That by no means lightens the subject under discussion.

In one grave instance, a minor aged about 4, got missing in a funeral crowd. Since 2017 the boy has not been found. His parents have crisscrossed every part of the map in vain in search of the handsome boy. Did the boy go to the funeral unaccompanied? This serves as a wake-up call to all others, especially market women who allow their toddlers to stray and mingle in market crowds while the mothers are busy selling.

The aged, the able-bodied, and indeed, as precedent shows, everybody can get missing. What is also alarming is the indifference of society’s members or their inattentiveness to happenings around them. Nobody cares about anybody anymore in the face of life’s pressures or in the name of the 21st-century mantra that seeks to curb oneself from things that are not part of their own. Ghanaians have slipped away from being each other’s keepers under the pretext of uncertainties that betide the good Samaritan.

The television station that made it a point to highlight incidences of missing persons in Ghana has hardly come up with news in which some of the missings are found. This means they are never found or are yet to be found.

Take the case of a petty trader in Kumasi who fell for the tricks of her ultimate killers at Mankessim. They had lured her to their gallows under the pretense of aiding her to travel overseas. Divine luck and perhaps, greed on the part of her adversaries were the reasons they were found out.  Are those missing living, dead, or living dead?

This lady went missing. It was later discovered she had been killed and buried in a room. The discovery led to more confessions that told the story of missing Gloria Yeboah of Kumasi.

Day in and day out, chilling stories are emerging about murders that bore ritual marks, of which victims are tortured by sadists who remove victims’ body parts whilst they are alive. They strangulate their victims to carry out crude executions.

The craze for human parts in Ghana is betrayed on several fronts, but one of the most horrendous of these was the uncovering of human cuts in a refrigerator operated by a young man of about  30 years at Abesim. Initial reports by the media indicated his victims were children in his neighborhood.

A young girl also misled a commercial motorcyclist from Akatsi to a remote village on the border between Ghana and Togo where the cyclist was murdered. This is a case involving Agbogli Louis.

”Bring the Takoradi girls” became another slogan of the missing in Ghana. This case became a hot issue, and after a long and difficult search by investigators, their skeletons were found in unmarked graves. The list keeps growing. Ghana’s missing is more than meets the eye, and this subject broached by Atinka TV makes its corporate social responsibility goals most unique. This is not to downplay the central role the Ghana Police have been playing in this respect.