The Vintage Fruits of NDC’s Culture of Disrespect

The death of 50-year-old Ms. Sheila Mansa Fugar at the Ridge Hospital, in Accra, is replete with enough blame to go around, as it were. This fateful event, we are told, occurred on Monday, September 17, 2018 (See “Death of 50-Year-Old Woman, Korle-Bu Exonerated Staff” CitiNewsRoom.com / Modernghana.com 9/30/18). As of this writing, the nature and/or cause of death of Ms. Fugar was not publicly known. But we learn to our utter displeasure, and even horror, that the relatives who had accompanied the seriously ill woman may likely have contributed to the death of the deceased, when they impatiently and presumptuously decided to transport Ms. Fugar by the ambulance in which the latter was receiving triage assessment or treatment at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH), the nation’s oldest and foremost healthcare facility, to the much smaller and relatively less well-equipped Ridge Hospital.

According to the Public Relations Officer of Korle-Bu, as the largest Ghanaian civilian hospital is popularly known, the relatives of the deceased woman had imperiously decided that they could facilitate a quicker and better treatment for Ms. Fugar by having the ambulance in which the latter was being administered triage to Ridge Hospital because, somehow, the doctors and nurses at Korle-Bu were not acting fast enough. Ms. Fugar, we are told, died the next day after the oxygen tank or cylinder from which she was being assisted to breathe ran out of air. This is inexcusably unfortunate but blaming doctors and nurses at Korle-Bu is egregiously wrong. What is clear here is that successive governments, largely dominated by the key operatives of the Rawlings-led tandem regimes of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), did little investment in the upgrading and modernization of the country’s health centers and medical facilities.

Couple the preceding with the perennial culture of vigilantism and abject disrespect for authority and professionalism, and one begins to get a more accurate picture of why Ms. Fugar had to die the quite apparently avoidable manner in which she died. In deciding to have Ms. Fugar transported from Korle-Bu to the Ridge Hospital, we are told that the dead woman’s relatives privileged or prioritized proximity or how close the hospital to which she was ultimately admitted was close to their abode or residential locale over the fact of which of the two aforementioned medical facilities could offer Ms. Fugar better or more efficient and qualitative treatment.

And so in the end, I guess one could fairly conclude, without being the least bit insensitive, that Ms. Fugar’s relatives appear to have gotten their wish. In other words, it was the choice of the relatives of the dead woman to have the latter administered the best available treatment that the doctors and nurses at Korle-Bu could provide under such stressful circumstances as the sort of scarcely tolerable incidence of overcrowding, which the 90-plus-year-old hospital has been faced with over the past several years, as the Rawlings-founded and chaperoned regimes of the National Democratic Congress played “Cash-and-Carry” Russian-Roulette with the health and welfare of the most impoverished and destitute of Ghanaian citizens.

So far, the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has more than creditably acquitted itself by making the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), implemented by former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, operable once again, after former President John Dramani Mahama literally ran the NHIS aground. But, of course, it cannot be gainsaid that unless the Akufo-Addo Administration is able to significantly upgrade the present standard and quality of our public healthcare centers and facilities around the country, no humongous amount of funding pumped into the NHIS would mean much, in terms of the quality of healthcare of the members of the country’s labor force.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 30, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]