The Jungle Out There...

Yes, it is a jungle out there.... By which characterization it is unabashedly implied the fact that Ghana may be dangerously hurtling towards the level and status of a failed state. Nearly three decades ago, when the notorious ultra-conservative Irish-American newspaper columnist and one-time Republican Party presidential candidate, Patrick J. Buchanan, described Ghana and the other African countries that emerged from under the leaden and exploitative European colonial yoke in the late 1950s and early 1960s as veritable failed states, many of us Africans resident here in the United States roundly condemned him as an unconscionable racist. Now we know better.

The bitter truth is that Ghana is a fast-failing state. It is a failing state because beyond the facade of the trappings of inherited erstwhile British colonial institutional structures, the central government has decidedly become a sociopolitical and cultural parasite. Our government is like a parent who is only a nominal parent, a parent in name only - the Government of Ghana is a parent merely because it has produced biological offspring. In functional terms, our central government is a veritable "dead-beat" parent, a paradox of a disturbingly unmistakable identity.

You see, it is a striking contradiction to call somebody a parent who is not a true parent because s/he has become irreparably irresponsible. Otherwise, how does one explain the Kafkaesque situation in which for nearly one year some Ghanaian medical doctors have yet to be issued their first paycheck/paycheque in eleven months? (See "Health Sector Is In Crisis - Former GHS Boss" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/29/15). Let me just ask this simple, largely rhetorical, question: How does President John Dramani Mahama go to bed at night, knowing fully well that during the same period that he has been drawing salaries and allowances far in excess of $100,000 (One-Hundred-Thousand Dollars) there are far better educated and more talented Ghanaian professionals who have yet to draw a single month's salary?

You have to be irredeemably unconscionable these days to enter the mainstream of Ghanaian politics. It also begins to make perfect sense that these doctors would threaten to resign their jobs en masse. I mean, what kind of employer expects his/her employee to work without pay for eleven months, only to sit at the negotiating table to determine the terms of his/ her pre-engagement contract all over again? Or is it because the conditions of service contract was drafted and signed off on as make-believe? Well, to add insult to injury, these victims of political criminality are classified as "Junior Doctors," as opposed to "Senior Doctors" who are, presumably, the "Real Doctors." In other words, what we are being made to understand is that these "Junior Doctors" can somehow be classified as "Toy Doctor".

If such cynical and callous labeling of our first-responders is not inexcusably stupid, I don't know what else is. Does the Labor Minister, for example, realize that these "Junior Doctors" individually spent approximately seven years in training at the university, only to be flagrantly rewarded with such abjectly short-shrift treatment. Not to unduly personalize matters, but I vividly recall when Mr. Haruna Iddrisu had his Master's Degree summarily revoked by the authorities of the nation's flagship academy, the University of Ghana. His crime was plagiarism. What surprised many of us then, was the fact that Mr. Iddrisu, or some such name, was allowed to hold onto his practically unearned graduate degree for at least a year or two.

The second non-surprise surprise was the fact that this academic fraud would not only be allowed to hold onto his then deputy/junior cabinet portfolio; he would subsequently be promoted to a substantive cabinet portfolio in an apparent nose-thumbing at those "snooty" academic dons who had duly decided to place much more value on academic performance than a mere "show up" on the Legon campus and at the lecture halls of Ghana's most prestigious tertiary academy.

What I am obviously driving at is the fact that a man knighted and ceded one of the most significant portfolios in the executive branch of government for making the barest minimumuse of his cranial "cream" or gray-matter, is highly unlikely to appreciate the worth and mettle of those who rose to the highest echelons of their professions the hard way. This is the problem with Ghanaian politics!

An equally significant part of the problem contributing to the abject disrespect of our "Junior Doctors" by our largely mediocre and third-rate politicians may be the fact that most, if not all, Ghanaian medical doctors are trained for free by the central government with the taxpayer's money. This welfarist regime has got to change and change immediately. Prospective doctors or physicians must be strongly encouraged to take up student loans to school themselves beyond their first degree or premedical academic and professional level. The money saved from such paradigmatic reconfiguration could then be appropriated in the payment of the salaries of these newly graduated first-responders.

To meliorate the likely problem of matriculating too few qualified applicants into our medical schools, as a result of the savvy abrogation of our unwieldy welfarist blanket scholarship program, the latter could be strictly restricted to the most brilliant and neediest applicants. These scholarship students could then be contracted to work for the government at a minimum of, say, five years at a decent salary scale to be promptly paid on the same schedule as that of our parliamentarians and staff members of the presidency.

The government may also do well to privatize some of our public hospitals and health centers and clinics in order to make them more competitive and efficient, with the National Health Insurance Scheme streamlined to make for prompt payment of medical services.

The no-brainer policy of shipping in Cuban doctors on the least threat of industrial action is decidedly passe, scandalous and regressive. Besides, if the government could be bold enough to level up with the Ghanaian taxpayer, it would arrive at the more than obvious conclusion that Cuban doctors are not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. To be certain, they are far more expensive and not necessarily better than their Ghanaian counterparts, especially when such salient factors as language and culture are taken into consideration.