By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 4, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
This case is both about poor policing and the bizarre transport of patients in need of urgent care in Ghana. It has to do with poor policing because the District Police Commander does not tell us exactly what prompted the Agogo, Asante-Akyem, police to go on a hunt for one Kofi Asadu that resulted in conflicting accounts of the latter’s having been badly injured in the process, as to have required immediate medical treatment (See “Agogo Shooting Victim Missing” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/3/15). We are told that this bizarre event occurred on Dec. 1, when the police went looking to arrest Mr. Asadu for reasons that were not clear at the time of this writing.
Whatever might have been the case, we are told that a badly wounded Mr. Asadu was rushed to the Agogo Presbyterian Hospital. It is at this point that matters get a bit murky. The truth, however, clearly appears to lie somewhere in-between the conflicting accounts presented by the Agogo police and the relatives of the alleged victim. Both versions of the account agree on the fact of Mr. Asadu’s having been injured in the process of evading an arrest for an unspecified criminal offense. Both accounts also seem to agree that the criminal suspect had attempted to scale a wall in the heat of the police chase. But this is about the extent of the narrative agreement. At this point, the relatives of the suspect, including his father, Opanyin Kwadwo Osei (or Osei Kwadwo), claim that the police opened gunfire at Mr. Asadu as a means of preventing the suspect from escaping the grips of the law. In the process, Mr. Asadu is alleged to have sustained gunshot wounds to the thigh.
The Agogo police vehemently denies this version of the account, and instead claims that the suspect/victim had fractured his right leg. But all these accounts are decidedly beside the point because as of this writing, the whereabouts of Mr. Asadu was being hotly debated between the Agogo police and the relatives of the victim. In sum, the preceding is the essence of the story. The Agogo District Police Commander, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Asamoah-Agyekum agrees that Mr. Asadu, the injured man, is not presently at the Agogo Presbyterian Hospital, where he was originally admitted for observation and treatment. Instead, ASP Asamoah-Agyekum claims that Mr. Asadu was shortly transferred to the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Koforidua, the Eastern Regional Capital. Agogo, of course, is in the Asante Region and much closer to such major health centers as the Konongo Government Hospital and the region’s flagship health center, the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH), the second most important public hospital in Ghana, after the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital.
In-between travel points, Mr. Asadu could also have been transferred to the Holy Family Hospital, at Nkawkaw, in the Eastern Region, which is much closer than Koforidua; or Atibie Hospital, on the Okwawu Scarp, just across the boundary marked by the Prah River. And so about the only plausible conclusion that any reasonably critical thinker arrives at is the very likelihood of Mr. Asadu’s having sustained a major trauma induced by the gunshot wounds alleged by the victim’s family to have been inflicted on Mr. Asadu by the Agogo police. If it turns out that Koforidua’s St. Joseph’s Hospital is the major trauma center of this part of the country, then all the proverbial puzzles could be aptly said to have neatly fallen into place. ASP Asamoah-Agyekum, the Agogo Police Commander, also claims to be in possession of the contact/phone number of the driver of the ambulance that carried Mr. Asadu to Koforidua, although ASP Asamoah-Agyekum also curiously claims that “the transfer of the victim [from the Agogo Hospital to Koforidua] has [absolutely] nothing to do with the police.”
I suppose what the District Police Commander is implying here is that other than the imperative need of keeping track of the criminal suspect, the very decision of having Mr. Asadu transferred relatively far away and out of the Asante Region, was exclusively the judgment call of the Agogo Presbyterian Hospital authorities. The Eastern Regional Correspondent of Class-Fm Radio, the media organization that first reported the story, says that checks at the St. Joseph’s Hospital, as well as the Koforidua Government Hospital “drew blanks,” meaning that Agogo District Police Commander has more explaining to do. Somebody clearly appears to be hiding Mr. Asadu somewhere. I am only hoping that the victim is alive and well on his way to a complete recovery.
