Cameron Duodu: Rip-Off Ghana

Okay, I know I am elderly and can be seen to be elderly.

But is Ghana so rife with would-be cheaters today that I have to be extra careful when I am engaging in what used to be normal business activities for me?

The other day I went to wait for a friend at a joint where we often used to have lunch together.

The place did not look like itself, as a lot of work seemed to be going on. But it was open, and as my friend was a bit late in arriving, I went and sat at a table with the intention of ordering a drink and making short work of it (as usual).

It took a bit of prodding to get a young lady to come out of the “insides” of the place. Quite honestly, she looked bored. Had I awoken her from a nap? Or a lovey-lovey conversation with her mobile phone?

I ask because if you haven’t noticed it, the mobile phone now rules supreme over everything. When it rings, whatever business was taking place earlier is beheaded promptly. The owner may say “Excuse me!” Or he or she may not. But the end-result is the same: business with you, who are physically present, is almost always suspended whilst the person on the phone is attended to.

As I have stated already, the young lady looked bored already as she emerged into daylight. But the news she carried with her was even worse. When I ordered a beer (these days, Club and Star are so much alike that it doesn’t matter which brand if offered!) she said, “We only have Guinness!”

What? Surely there isn’t a shortage of beer in Ghana at the moment? This woman was taking me back to very very very bad days in Ghana! Days when beer was more precious than silver and gold, because –hmm mm!— kalabule people hoarded it and only sold it to people they knew! Days when in order to get beer, one was sometimes obliged to visit places where one would normally not want to set foot!

“What? You have no beer?”

“No. Only Guinness.”

I’ve never been a fan of Guinness though in my younger years, when I was as thin as a rake, people had advised me to drink it, because it had “medicinal properties” in it that would make me put on weight.

Even in those days, I didn’t want to “put on weight, though it was conventional wisdom in Ghana that in order to be thought healthy, one must exhibit some “flesh” on one’s body! What nonsense that was is proved by the fact that these days, I have to strive quite hard to bring my waistline to proportions acceptable to me. Who wants to see folds on one’s stomach?

In my mind, I said, “What can one mini-bottle of Guinness do to you? You are thirsty, and you hate sugary drinks. Take the Guinness now. When your friend arrives, you can go somewhere else and have a beer.”

So, I ordered the Guinness. And drank it. I didn’t feel any better, but neither did I feel worse. It was one of those circumstances that one accepts because one has no choice. The Guinness cost what was an insignificant amount to me and I felt guilty when I gave the seller all I had – a 200 iced note. But she didn’t complain but took it and went “inside” again.

My friend came. We finished our business rather quickly because he had another meeting to go to. He left before me and I went back to my table. I asked an assistant in my car to go and poke her head “inside” the joint and tell the seller that I wanted to go and needed my change.

Normally, I would have expected the seller to give my change to the assistant, but she came out with it herself.

It was change for fifty cedis!

Shocked, I said, “I gave you 200 cedis!”

She said, “No, you gave me fifty!”

I repeated: “I gave you 200!”

She repeated, You gave me fifty.”

To be frank, I was shocked beyond belief. This woman didn’t know who I was; nor did she need to know. The fact that I knew the owner of the joint and would put her in serious trouble if I reported that she had doubted my word so stubbornly weighed heavily with me. She looked to be at an age where she probably had a baby or two. Maybe she was a single mother. Could I bear the thought of being responsible for her getting sacked and being unable to look after her children any longer?

I could have wept! In an attempt to rationalise the situation, I hit on the idea that the 50-cedi note bears almost the same colours as the 200-note. Hadn’t he Bank of Ghana been negligent in making the two notes so much alike? Surely, an opportunist day-robber could deliberately sow confusion in the mind of an elderly customer and rob him of 150 cedis by pretending to have been given 50 cedis instead of 200?

Ina bid to convince my assistant and my driver that she was telling the truth, she went “inside” and brought out what she claimed were the proceeds of the day. “See, there is no 200 cedi note among the incontinent the till!” she insisted.

This convinced me that the woman was a thief. Only a dishonest person could urge such a hollow means of accepting her word upon me, Would she allow me to go inside the joint and look in every nook and cranny to see whether she had hidden my 200 cedi note somewhere and was only bringing out money that dud t include a 200 note?

Remember my recent dispute with employees of the Ghana Water Company? On that occasion too my honesty had been questioned. But I had been saved because the river had been able to retrieve my receipt geom the papers that lay strewn all over my office.

At the joint, however, I had no help. It was my word against the woman’s word. Either I involved her boss and possibly the police in the matter, or I had to let her chop the 200 cedis.

I chose not to pursue the matter. Sorry, I know it was a cop-out on my part.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to make a fuss over 200 cedis. In fact, I would not have brought the matter to public notice at all, if it was not for my suspicion, remote though it might be, that the Bank of Ghana may have made a serious mistake by giving Ghanaians two notes that apparently look so much alike and change the colours of one of them.