Ministry of Health Must Listen Up!

I cannot completely fault the "marauding" Muslim youths who were recently reported to have assaulted a couple of doctors and nurses, at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, over the handing over of the corpse of a stillborn child to the relatives of the assailants (See "KATH Doctors Remain on Strike" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/18/14).

I cannot wholly fault them because having spent most of my youth as a patient in several Ghanaian hospitals and clinics, including the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, I am well aware of the peevish bureaucratic redtape these bereaved relatives must have gone through. It is almost certain that the system has gotten functionally worse than it was thirty years ago, when I happily shipped out of the country.

The Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital also has great significance for me because my eldest maternal uncle, Rev. Lt.-Col. H. H. Sintim-Aboagye, a World War II veteran, worked there during the late 1950s as a nurse-pharmacist. Then also, my immediate older sister was delivered in that Asante regional flagship medical facility about the same time that President John Dramani Mahama was born. I would also frequent KATH's eye clinic for my regular supply of Banocide and, when in short supply at KATH, travel out to either the Agogo Presbyterian Hospital or the Kokofu Leprosarium.

I would also regularly accompany my elder cousin, the recently retired Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Kwame Sintim-Aboagye, then a detective corporal at the Sofoline Police Station, to identify and fingerprint dead bodies at the KATH mortuary, directly located across the street from the Apatakese Ase (or Under The Big Shed) of Anokyekrom of the Ghana National Cultural Center. And so, practically speaking, the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital is more than simply a major institutional landmark in my imagination and fond memories of Oseikrom, the great imperial metropolis founded by Otumfuo Osei-Tutu I, my direct ancestor on both sides of my parents' fathers.

Anyway, what also disturbed me about the use of the bestial word of "marauders" in description of the "Muslim" youths who allegedly assaulted the KATH staff by the JoyOnline reporter who covered the event, or the aftermath of the same, is the fact that it strikingly reflects the obnoxiously superior attitude of mainstream - or white-American - reporters who cover similar events and situations in the African-American and other non-white communities all across the United States.

The equally striking difference in attitude here in the United States, though, is that journalists who unwisely tinge their stories with ethnic and/or racial biases and stereotypes are routinely subjected to mordant carping. The latter public and professional reaction is sometimes called "shaming." In other words, such unprofessional reporters are routinely put to shame.

In Ghana, though, it eerily appears as if reporters who unwisely cross the line between strict professional reportage and the unsavory politics of ethnic- and creed-/or religious-baiting have a field day. They have free rein and absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to worry about. I have yet to hear Prof. Kwame Karikari's group take up this ideologically flagrant matter. This, of course, is in no way to justify the reckless and grossly undisciplined behavior of the Muslim youths who assaulted the health workers at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital.

The problem the critically thinking reader had reading the story of the JoyOnline reporter, however, was that one wasn't quite certain whether the allegedly gross misbehavior of the youths had everything to do with the fact of their being of Islamic religious persuasion, or it was simply because they abjectly lacked adequate parental training and supervision. It is also quite obvious that hospital security needs to be remarkably boosted up. The government may even do well to consider training a section of the personnel of the Ghana Police Service for all our major medical centers and clinics.

In the wake of the Hoehoe episode, one had hoped the Mahama government would put in place the necessary measures the woeful lack of which caused the Hoehoe incident to rapidly spiral out of control. I also have a wistful and suspicious feeling that some disgruntled hospital staff are deliberately exaggerating the trend and tenor of the disturbances to suit their own premeditated agenda of industrial work stoppage. Nothing could be so ignoble, especially where the lives of the sick and most vulnerable are so callously and unconscionably subjected to unsavory labor politics.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Feb. 18, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]