Grace Fosu was about to give birth at a maternity ward in Ghana’s capital Accra when she says she received a phone call from her employer, the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS), telling her that she was being let go from her job.
“I am in labor and you are calling me to tell me this, do you want me to die?” Fosu, 33, recalled telling the metro fire officer. After hanging up, Fosu delivered a healthy baby girl, Salamat. But instead of feeling joy, she was consumed with grief.
“For the dismissal, I went through hell … I was very, very sad because I wasn’t expecting this,” Fosu told CNN about the September 2014 phone call.
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Fosu and her husband, Seidu Abubakari, had married the previous year, after meeting at an athletics tournament for Ghana’s security officials; Fosu ran the sprints for the fire service and Abubakari was a long distance runner for Ghana’s customs agency. Salamat was their first child, and they were looking forward to starting a family together. Weeks after their daughter was born, the couple were summoned by the fire service and a formal dismissal letter, in which Fosu’s pregnancy was described as an “offence,” was handed to her husband.
When I opened the letter, I was confused. Then my body started shaking so I tried to control myself and my wife too,” Abubakari, 38, said, adding that fire service officials largely ignored Fosu’s presence in the room.
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The letter stated that Fosu was in violation of “Regulation 33 clause (6) of the Ghana National Fire Service Conditions of Service,” which prohibited female firefighters from becoming pregnant in their first three years of employment. Fosu had never before heard of the decades-old rule, which was established when the fire service was formed in 1963.
The spokesman for Ghana’s National Fire Service, Ellis Okoe, told CNN that the regulation was created because “fire service work involves a lot of strenuous effort” and that “if you are pregnant it could cause a lot of problems.
“It’s unclear how many women have been affected by the regulation, but Fosu’s experience suggests a selective enforcement of the rule. She says 11 other women in her class of firefighters were also pregnant within the same three-year period, but she was the only one to be kicked out of the service. Okoe said that the fire service “doesn’t have statistics” on all of those dismissed under the clause, and could not explain why Fosu’s peers who became pregnant were allowed to continue working.
Fosu believes she was targeted over an incident in which she says she was sekzually harassed by a senior male officer. She says the officer called her one evening demanding sekz and gave her unsolicited advice on ways she could abort her baby. Abubakari, who witnessed the conversation, confronted the officer. But the couple never reported the incident.Spokesman Okoe told CNN that the fire service has rules against sekzual harassment and abuse, including an internal tribunal to investigate claims, which would have been utilized if Fosu had lodged a complaint.
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Fosu says she never filed an official report against the officer — who is still in the service — because the harassment stopped after her husband confronted him.
After being dismissed and with nothing left to lose, she says she decided to take action against the fire service.
She reported her dismissal to Ghana’s Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), an independent constitutional body with powers to investigate human rights abuses in the country.
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“Quite a number of similar cases had come from the uniformed services of Ghana,” CHRAJ commissioner Joseph Whittal told CNN, explaining that similar rules about pregnancy exist in Ghana’s armed forces, police and immigration service.
A Ghana Armed Forces spokesman told CNN that the military has a policy governing when women recruits get pregnant until six months past the end of the training period; it previously had a three-year ban like the fire service. A Ghana Police Service spokeswoman told CNN that women who got pregnant during their 18-month probation period were given maternity leave and allowed to return to work. CNN has reached out to the immigration service for comment on their policies.
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“Because the grounds for dismissal was based on a regulation, the only option was to seek a declaration from the courts invalidating it,” Whittal said.
For years, CHRAJ had been waiting for a complainant willing to take such a case to court. Women who had previously reported their dismissals on similar grounds to CHRAJ withdrew because they didn’t want to go through the court process, which can often be cumbersome and drawn out. But Fosu says she was not deterred.
And as the lawyers at CHRAJ prepared to sue the fire service, another woman, Thelma Hammond, came forward with a similar story.
Credit: Edition.cnn.com
