Sometime towards the middle of last year, I was driving past the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum. For several months prior to this drive by I had noticed that the Mausoleum had been concealed behind some cladding. The cladding was supposed to protect on-going renovation works at the place. The day I drove past was just around the time the cladding had been removed. Looking at what had been achieved, I felt a gladness and pride in my heart. It was a new, beautifully themed park. And I just wished, that we could maintain what we had been done to the place.
A few days later, around July, 2023, the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, was to drive in pomp and pageantry to re-commission the facility and open it up for business.
That was just shy of about a year ago.
In December 2012, the then President, John Dramani Mahama, also, in similar style and pageantry, went to commission the Winneba Accident and Trauma Centre in the Central Region.
These two institutions come to my mind, because of two incidents that happened in the week just past. With the Nkumah Mausoleum, it has been reported that less than a year after it was opened, it is now nearly unfit for purpose.
And the Winneba Facility is now actually taking patients out of the hospital and dumping them in bushes, with one recorded fatality.
As a society, these incidents should leave us deeply, deeply ashamed of ourselves, and to ask ourselves many pertinent questions, find real answers, establish where we are failing as a nation, find relevant answers, so that we can avert such humiliations in future.
I have made this call before in times past. I have no doubt at all, given our nature, that I would, in the near future, find reasons to come back to repeat the same concerns.
It is as if we are cursed.
With the Nkrumah Mausoleum, we could very easily have made it self-sustaining. It is a revenue mobilization agency, where people pay to enter and celebrate Ghana’s unique personality called Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. It should have been a reasonably simply thing to appoint a board and management that would have the competence to ensure that it does not degenerate with use.
Yet, less than a year after it was inaugurated, it is making headlines over failing facilities, weedy lawns, seedy ponds and failing taps. What is wrong with us?
The situation with the Nkrumah Mausoleum is eerily similar to the case of the woman who was abandoned in the bush by the Trauma and Specialist Hospital, Winneba.
About ten days ago, it was reported that a woman had been found in the bush after she had been dropped off by an ambulance, of all vehicles.
It was later established that this woman had been a patient of the Trauma Hospital at Winneba. She was taken to the hospital because she was involved in an accident.
According to the hospital administrator, she was taken out of the hospital and dumped in the bush, because she was making noise and disturbing other patients in the night, and was also unable to meet her medical bills.
First off, we have been told that the infamous and dreadful ‘cash and carry’ policy that used to hold sway at our hospitals, has been scrapped, to be replaced with the National Health Insurance Authority Service. Under that scheme, all Ghanaians are presumed to contribute into a central fund, with or without a card, and therefore she ought to have received full medical care.
Secondly, all hospitals have Social Welfare Departments, and the presumption, even if the Winneba Hospital did not have a Social Welfare Department, is that a report would be made to the nearest Social Welfare Department.
Again, this was not done. What was done, was that the poor woman was bundled into an ambulance and driven to some place in the bush and left to die.
I am too sad for words.
There is something intrinsically wrong with us and how we are handling our affairs. Unless we identify what is wrong with us and try to deal with it, it is almost certain that we would continue to find ourselves in these situations.
Many years ago, we managed to kill one hundred and twenty Ghanaians at the Accra Sports Stadium. Nowadays we even forget when the anniversary of that slaughter comes around. More than a decade later, we continue to mire ourselves in these tragedies.
Sad.
