The two cameramen, Abdulai Issaka and Bashiru Issaka, were caught in crossfire when the assembly led the officers in a revenue mobilisation exercise on the streets within the municipality.
Early this month, the Bolgatanga Municipal Assembly launched a surprise exercise to mobilise revenue from defaulting owners of shops and signposts. To ensure that the operation was a success, the assembly accompanied its mobilisation team with the Ghana Police Service and the Ghana National Fire Service to deal with the much-anticipated public resistance.
The operation on the first day saw a number of stores locked up and scores of signposts either uprooted or flattened. As expected, some shop owners resisted, armed with documents to prove they did not owe the assembly. But the team, which apparently was not prepared to listen to explanations, still found some faults as enough reasons to penalise storekeepers and signpost owners.
For example, traders who had extended the eavesdrops of their shops by a finger’s length just to avoid the disturbing rain splash and sunrays were asked to pay spot fines ranging between seventy Ghana cedis and one hundred Ghana cedis or have their stores bolted with colossal padlocks from the Assembly’s ‘blacksmiths’.
To worsen matters for traders who had no roaming cash on them, the team also insisted on ready notes, not cheque. Some traders resisted, claiming that the extra demands imposed by the Assembly officials were not part of the Assembly’s bye-laws. But they were matched with brute force from the Police and the Fire Service officers. One of the brutalised traders had his teeth removed in the struggles whilst some shops were completely destroyed. Some stores were locked up without pity for the perishable items in them.
When two Metro TV cameramen, Abdulai Issaka and Bashiru Issaka, focused their camera on a scene in which the officers were dragging one of the traders on the ground to their vehicle, they were subjected to physical assault. Bashiru Issaka escaped the hit of a sledge hammer from one of the angry-looking Fire Service officers, but had his camera crushed and seized. The tape inside the camera, which also contained some important news materials about a schoolboy who jumped to his death from a four-storey building at the Bolgatanga Technical Institute and other sensitive items, was also destroyed.
The development attracted some veteran journalists as well as the Upper East Regional Chairman of the Ghana Journalists Association, Mr. Eric Amoh, to the scene.
In an interview with this writer, Mr. Dominic Abakuri, a medical consultant, said even though he presented all documents to the team to show that his medical centre did not owe the assembly, his explanation was brushed aside and he was wrongly accused.
“Since the team insisted on locking up my office, I only decided to go for my car key and money which were inside the office. They wouldn’t allow me. I only had a body contact with one of the police officers and they held it against me as a crime,” he narrated after he had been dragged to the police vehicle not any less than a criminal guilty of the charge pressed against him.
“Why should they [the Assembly] charge me as much as one hundred Ghana cedis (Gh¢100) just for extending my roof to protect the door to my shop from rain?” asked Mr. Richard Anim, one of the affected businessmen. “And why are they insisting on cash, not cheque?” he pressed.
Some aggrieved-looking businesswomen who spoke to this paper said they could not help wondering if the sour twist to the revenue collection exercise was the “e dey bee keke” campaign promise trumpeted by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) on the road to the 2012 victory— or the team from the Assembly “was just doing its own thing”.
The two Metro TV cameramen are yet to recover from the neck and chest pains suffered from the brutality suffered in the crossfire. The whereabouts of the crushed camera and the tape is not known and an overdose of efforts to glean a reaction from the Municipal Chief Executive for Bolga, Mr. Edward Ayagle, has proved abortive.
The Upper East Regional Police Commander, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) Bright Oduro, who was not in the region at the time, assured this writer in a telephone interview of thorough investigations into the incident.
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