Justice, in this country, has learned to check what someone is wearing before deciding how to feel about their crime.
Latifa Salifu walked into the Mamprobi Polyclinic in a borrowed uniform, lifted a four-day-old boy from beside his healing mother, and carried him out through a door no one thought to lock. The law is not confused about what this is. The Criminal Offences Act is not confused. The only people causing confusion are the ones drawing government salaries and, therefore, should know better.
Dr. Agnes Naa Momo Lartey, Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, stood before cameras and told the nation that Latifa Salifu is ” I just want to say that she is a woman in desperate need of a child. She saw a very convenient environment and took advantage of it.” She announced psychosocial support for the suspect. She told us, without quite saying it, that desperation is its own kind of absolution.
Picture a man who has not eaten in three days. His children are hollow-eyed with hunger. He steals a bag of rice from a market stall because his body has crossed the border from discomfort into emergency. Does any minister appear on JoyNews to trace the geography of his poverty? Does the state mobilise a psychosocial package for him? Does anyone restructure the story so that the market woman he robbed becomes a footnote in his biography of suffering?
You already know the answer.
This is the formula, and it is applied with surgical consistency. When a man commits violence, we ask what he did. When a woman commits the same act, we are steered toward what she felt. One faces the full anatomy of consequence. The other is wrapped in the warm cotton of circumstance. We have normalised this split so completely that a cabinet minister can perform it on national television without pausing to hear what it does to the idea of equal justice.
What Dr. Lartey has done is substitution. She replaced Latifa Salifu’s crime with Latifa Salifu’s pain, and in doing so, quietly moved Precious Ankomah, the caesarean-recovering mother who woke to find her son gone, to the margins of her own ordeal. This is the shifting goalpost in plain view: move the narrative fast enough, and the victim becomes context, while the perpetrator becomes the subject.
The long-term arithmetic of this arrangement is simple. If the consequence is negotiable depending on the emotional story we can build around the criminal, then the law stops being a deterrent and becomes a conversation. Those without softening attributes, who present to society without the additional credential of womanhood to invoke, carry the unmitigated weight of what the law was always designed to deliver. Men are languishing in Nsawam Prisons right now for crimes that drew no ministerial compassion, no government-coordinated support packages. Their desperation was noted in the police report and nowhere else.
Latifa Salifu must face the full consequences of what she did. The child she stole did not choose to be born into a country where accountability has a gender. Precious Ankomah did not choose to wake to an empty space where her son had been. Whatever wound Latifa carries, it did not entitle her to press it violently onto a four-day-old boy and a mother fresh from surgery.
The minister can offer support through whatever social protection architecture the state maintains. She cannot do it by dismantling, in public, the foundational principle that the law belongs to everyone without condition. She cannot purchase Latifa Salifu’s rehabilitation with the currency of another woman’s justice.
A country that decides whose crimes deserve prison and whose deserve therapy has not built a justice system. It has built a preference system. And preference, unlike justice, was never designed to be blind.
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