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24.06.2021 Feature Article

We Should Be in the Vanguard of COVID Vaccine Production by Now

We Should Be in the Vanguard of COVID Vaccine Production by Now
24.06.2021 LISTEN

Whenever I see a picture of Presidential Advisor Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare, Ghana’s former Director-General of Medical Services, I feel very proud and fulfilled beyond myself as an individual Ghanaian citizen by birth and upbringing. You see, Dr. Nsiah Asare, as you may vividly recall, was the Chief Medical Director at the nation’s second largest and second most important civilian health center, namely, the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH), when the then-President John “Akonfem-SADA” Dramani Mahama used his powers as Head-of-State and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces to arbitrarily fire him for what clearly appeared at the time to be purely a politically laced decision, obviously having to do with the fact that this titan of Ghana’s medical profession was a bona fide member of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo-inspired establishment of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

But you see, having sworn by the age-old Hippocratic Oath, Dr. Nsiah Asare was obligated to serve all of his patients, irrespective of creed, religion or political party colors and ideological affiliation. One might also add, ethnicity, gender apportionment and sexual orientation. And this was pretty much what my St. Peter’s Secondary School, Kwahu-Nkwatia, senior had been studiously doing for more than two decades, when a lame-brained, kleptocratic and patently pathologically partisan Mr. Mahama decided to summarily fire the man whose Intelligence Quotient (IQ) must be at least five times, if not ten times, that of Kwame Gonja, in order to simply replace one of the country’s finest physicians and medical practitioners with a “Yes-Man” from his own robber-baron fraught political establishment, to wit, the National Democratic Congress.

This is rather pathetic, and we may never know how many Ghanaian citizens and residents got callously and directly or indirectly killed by this most wrongheaded, hate-filled Mahama decision. Which is also why when the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, brags about having built dozens of hospitals and other health facilities during the four-and-half years when he, literally, held Ghanaians by their throttle or Adam’s Apple, one can only snort and afford Kwame Gonja a dismissive back of the hand. You see, the accidental Fourth-Republican President who has been mired in more bribery and extortion scams than any other leader, with the possible exception of the late Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, to wit, Chairman Jeremiah John Rawlings, has next to absolutely no remarkable appreciation for the fact that the empty architectural landmarks or buildings earmarked as hospitals and health centers and facilities are by themselves absolutely without any functional significance, short of being fully staffed by well-trained genius medical practitioners like Dr. Nsiah Asare, a vintage and veritable product of the late Father Josef Glatzel, when PERSCO – as St. Peter’s is widely known and affectionately called throughout the West African Subregion – ruled the roost among Ghana’s leading and finest secondary schools, presently called Senior High Schools.

The preceding good memories notwithstanding, sometimes I have the sad feeling that had Dr. Nsiah Asare and dozens of his classmates, and many of my own classmates from PERSCO, been born and raised in a country with a more responsible and visionary leadership, the mention of the name of Dr. Nsiah Asare would be immediately followed by the glorious encomium of “Nobel Prize Laureate” in either Physiology or Medicine. It has taken some of us an unusually and unnecessarily long journey to get us to where we are presently. And in all this, we have abjectly poor leadership and gross revolutionary indiscipline and criminal misadventure to blame.

Even so, we can still be incontrovertibly reckoned to be the very cream of the crop, when it comes to the measurement of Ghana’s highest achieving scholars and professionals. Yes, I am most sorry and saddened by the fact that instead of talking about and referring to Dr. Anthony Nsiah Asare as the world-renowned Nobel Prize Laureate and Distinguished Director of Ghana’s equivalent of America’s National Centers for Disease Control and Infectious Diseases and Cutting-Edge Production of COVID-19 Vaccines, we have a medical big cheese like my venerable old PERSCO senior schoolmate desperately soliciting vaccines from countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect Ghana’s most vulnerable and economically deprived citizens (See “We’re Working on AstraZeneca Vaccines for People to Have Their 2nd Jab – Dr. Nsiah Asare” 6/11/21). Who said that where you were born and bred does not significantly factor into who will or can become?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 11, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]

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