A Strangely, Tragically Funny Story That Is Not Funny

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

The story in of itself is neither strange nor funny. It is, however, decidedly tragic. Still, what makes it intriguing in an instructive way is the fact that it is all too rampant in our country. And it has to do with, you guessed right, Ghana’s ramshackle healthcare delivery system. In this instance, it has to do with the widely alleged shabby treatment of women in labor. The issue in focus, in short, is negligence.

Not very long ago, when the first African-American first lady of the United States was on a whirlwind tour of the country with America’s first gentleman, she was reported to have had on her itinerary a visit to one of the major hospitals in the Ghanaian capital of Accra. I forget which hospital it was, except for the harrowing report that at the labor ward of the aforesaid hospital – let’s call it Marie-Louise Hospital – nearly as many heavily pregnant and laboring women lay on the bare floor as were on hospital beds. It was also reported that some women with pregnancy complications had been summarily turned away from the obviously overbooked labor ward back to the very hospitals that had initially referred these expectant mothers to Marie-Louise in the first place!

I don’t quite remember who said the following: “The level of any civilization can best be gauged by the quality of treatment afforded its womenfolk and children.” If, indeed, it just happens that I did, then I am almost definitely proud to, perhaps, a bit presumptuously rank myself in the hallowed company of that genius Ghanaian philosopher-educator who immortally observed that: “When you educate a man, you educate an individual; but when you educate a woman, you really educate the entire nation.”

The problem of criminal negligence in the Ghanaian public-health sector is nothing new. For twenty years, Strongman Jeremiah John Rawlings stockpiled small munitions and jealously guarded his political entrenchment while such vital sectors of national development as healthcare, education and business, literally, went to the dogs. And currently, with the inauspicious, albeit predictable, return of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) to power, it goes without saying that “it is déjà-vu all over again.” This was the same government, then chaperoned by Mr. Rawlings, that systematically and callously ruined the Ghanaian public-health system from its welfarist origins into a cutthroat Darwinian regime called “Cash-and-Carry” delivery system, in which the poor and destitute effectively had no access to medical care whatsoever, not even emergency medical care.

Indeed, I cannot begin to detail the number of relatives who severely suffered under this most savage medical system, smugly sponsored by a government that claimed to be doggedly in pursuit of a humanistic ideology of “Social Democracy.”

What is also quizzically intriguing is that in the eight years during which the Danquah-leaning New Patriotic Party (NPP) held fort and introduced the current universal National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), under which system every Ghanaian citizen and resident is entitled to medical care at a premium, with minors and the superannuated being exempt from premium payments, the then-opposition National Democratic Congress ridiculed the practicality of the NHIS. Of course, having been tutored by the World Bank and the IMF, these NDC social democrats came to associate their ideology with the Animal-Farm type of culture that had prevailed under Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, in which the working poor were required to “tighten your belts,” even while the suspenders-sporting fat cats continued to voraciously gorge themselves on the public dole.

The problem here, though, was that oftentimes those who were being asked to “tighten your belts” in the sacred interest of national development, had no belts, to begin with.

Anyway, recently, the wife of Ghana’s Deputy Energy Minister, Mr. Inusah Fuseini, was reported to have expired during childbirth, or labor, at the National Police Hospital, one of the finest and best of its kind in the country. To be certain, about the only other hospital ranked qualitatively higher than the Police Hospital is the 37th Military Hospital, originally established by imperial Britain during World War II.

What makes the death of the Deputy Energy Minister’s wife newsworthy is the fact of its being attributed to the gross negligence of hospital staff, rather than either the woeful lack of state-of-the-art equipment or being simply due to circumstances beyond the professional expertise of medical personnel. As of this writing (5/9/10), leading Ghanaian radio network MyJoyOnline.com had reported that full-investigations were being conducted by police authorities into the cause of Mrs. Fuseini’s death (See “Death of Deputy Energy Minister’s Wife; Negligence Suspected” 4/22/10).

Anyway, what makes this particular situation quite interesting is the fact that other than European patients, obviously the direct result of a psychological disorder called “Colonial Mentality,” it is privileged citizens such as state ministers and their wives and relatives (and deputies as well, of course) who are routinely afforded the best available treatment at many a state- or publicly-owned hospital or health center. And so we ought to be at a loss as to why on this particular occasion, and in this most imperative instance, hospital personnel, inexplicably, decided to allow themselves to attract the sort of undesirable attention that could well culminate in the avoidable loss of several hard-to-come-by jobs and even, possibly, criminal prosecution?

For one, we are not informed anywhere in the story that hospital personnel had been on strike and thus the maintenance of heavily reduced staffing at the time of Mrs. Fuseini’s death. Any occurrence such as the foregoing, of course, may well have been plausibly chalked up as a mitigating circumstance, although hardly an excusable one.

Still, should investigators come to the unusual conclusion that, indeed, Mrs. Fuseini had died as a direct result of professional negligence, the horror would not simply inhere in this widely publicized labor-death of one prominent mother, but the labor-deaths of hundreds of “nobody” mothers routinely and callously left to die daily, without even one breath’s hint of media spotlight.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is also a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy policy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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