Ambulance carting cement: Stop shifting blame and punish culprits - Ambulance Service told

Head of Research at the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC), Benjamin Nsiah, has expressed doubt about the recent communique by the Ghana Ambulance Service on the ambulance-turned cement cargo situation.

According to him, the Service with its release is only trying to shift blame and avoid accountability.

“I believe what this public institution is doing now is to shift all the blame on the mechanic so that Ghanaians do not chastise them so much as the mechanic is a third party here. Then they tell Ghanaians that they are investigating. So then when they are done with the investigations, they will let them know the results”, he told Happy FM’s Don Prah on the ‘Epa Hoa Daben’ show.

Benjamin thus called on the appropriate authorities to act fast and fish out anyone who needs to be penalized or punished for the recent incident.

“Looking at the statement from the ambulance service, it shows that no one wants to own up to responsibility and accountability and we don’t have authorities that can sanction or penalize those people. I believe that when there is a penalization or punishment meted out to these people, these cases will go down or people will start owning up to what they do”, he added.

He was of the view that by the time the public institution will be done with its investigations, the media would have moved on to another news story and then everyone forgets about it.

Benjamin, thus, encouraged the media to hammer on the issue until “someone causes an arrest to serve as a deterrent to others”.

A government of Ghana-plated ambulance was captured on video being used to load cement. Two men, believed to be workers at a cement shop, were captured busily packing the bags into the ambulance.

The National Ambulance Service (NAS), however, in its press statement dated June 1, stated that the “said vehicle with registration number GV-537-20, was one of the Ambulances awaiting the fixing of minor faults by the supplier before being received and integrated into the National Ambulance Service fleet”.

According to NAS, preliminary investigations carried out reveal that the said ambulance was in the custody of its supplier, Service Ghana Autogroup Ltd for servicing.