Ghanaians are being used as guinea pigs?

A couple of days ago a story entitled titled ‘GMA dares govt to bring in Cuban doctors’ on Ghanaweb caught my attention. In it was a statement purported to have been made by the General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association which I considered most unfortunate. It was stated in the article that this General Secretary made the most reckless and tactless remark that “there are reports of people accusing the Cuban doctors of using their patients as “guinea pigs”. This statement was made ostensibly to rubbish an allegation that govt had a hidden agenda to replace striking Ghanaian doctors with Cuban doctors. I found this utterly distasteful coming not only from a medical doctor but a national secretary of the doctors association – a senior member of that profession. So after all it is not only our politicians who have a monopoly on talking absolute nonsense. Taking a cue from Dr Siribour’s remark, it dawned on me that we also have clones of the likes of Asiedu-Nketia, Nana Akomea, Okudjeto Ablakwa, Kofi Juma, Tony Aidoo and oh! lets not overlook the unforgettable Presidential aspirant, Ayariga, in the medical field.

Before I proceed with the thrust of my contribution, I must first of all make it quite clear that I am actually in full support of the doctors strike action. That being the case, I must further explain that my support for their action is not necessarily because I think doctors should be paid more salaries and allowances way over and above all other categories of govt workers. My contention is simply that any such action by doctors encapsulates and represents the frontline expressions of the long-suffering working class of this country, most of whom are not sufficiently knowledgeable or insistent on their rights and are more vulnerable to being manipulated and dismissed from govt service if they dared go on strike. They are therefore dissuaded from taking the bull by the horns in such matters. Doctors on the other hand enjoy high public esteem and the folly of any govt to attempt to dismiss even one of them on issues of a labor conflict for example, would have a catastrophic boomerang effect.

Any doctors strike action should therefore give a hint to or inform any group of people in govt who have enough brains to think, to realize that things must really be bad on the ground. The kind of people who eventually turn out to be doctors – at least in this country, are not usually the sort who are inclined to be confrontational in attitude or jump in the public domain to indiscreetly demand more pay. We went to school with them and we know that instinctively they are too ‘krakye’ ‘dadaba’ and book-long to violate social norms and endure any kind of conflict. These are people who are generally petrified of taking tro-tro not only because they fear the bullying of the ‘aplanke' but also because they think that riding in a tro-tro would amount to an indefensible lowering of imaginary status and above-all, professional stigmatization. Even within their own ranks, the incurable vanity of alumni superiority and the high cockalorum of family status is rife. However when doctors do decide to confront authority, it should seriously be considered as a symptom of an advanced stage of social and political degradation - that the barometer of economic deprivation in society has truly and verily reached boiling point.

When doctors go on strike for more emoluments, it is also an indication that the mass of the grassroots population whose fate and existence are not normally reflected in the formal budgetary considerations of fat-cat politicians in Africa, are living not from hand to mouth anymore, but in pure hell. So therefore when doctors do go on strike it is good for all of us because at the very least, it is probably one of the few available and effective shock-therapies that will jolt thick-skinned inept African govts to sit up and take into consideration, the plight of also those who made it possible for them the politicians to live like Hollywood stars in an economically ravaged third world country like Ghana.

Thus far, I believe that the doctors have managed their public relations quite well on matters concerning the on-going strike action. The recent statement by their General Secretary however provokes a certain uneasy feeling that the medical profession itself has suffered from some kind of personality crisis from the on-going confrontation. We all know that doctors are a very well composed lot of people who don’t normally talk nonsense but when a senior doctor comes out to say things that fit that description, it should be a cause of concern for all of us because, aside from pay and strike issues, we need doctors who we consider as respectable, sensible, compassionate, tolerant and analytical. For a doctor – and for that matter a senior one, to spew out obvious and insensitive untruths in self-defense that go to suggest that they are not entirely confident of their own professional credibility, is for me a little bloodcurdling. For a second I wondered whether Dr Frank Siribour was a grassroots propaganda hell-raiser of the NDC clandestinely moonlighting as the General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association.

As the popular Ghanaian idiom goes, if you are taking your bath and a madman comes around and runs away with your clothes, it would amount to sheer folly on your part to chase him into the public domain in your nakedness to retrieve your clothes. But this is what precisely Dr Frank Siribour, the General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association, did in reaction to Anita de Souza’s threat. If Dr Frank Siribour does not know, Anita de Souza is the kind of upstart brash politician who is best ignored. If he does not know this, then he himself is not fit to be the General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association. It means that he is not sufficiently street-wise and at the same time intellectually mature enough to handle that position.

I think that Dr Frank Siribour, the General Secretary of the Ghana Medical Association, should promptly without any reservations or delay whatsoever, retract and apologize to the Cuban doctors in this country for that most unfortunate statement he was purported to have made. If he did not say so, he must also in like manner, quickly come out to deny saying so.

All Ghanaians owe an immeasurable amount of gratitude to Cuban doctors who under a policy of international friendship, have ‘sacrificed’ their lives to come to a faraway land like Ghana to heal and to save lives of our compatriots. They do this and this is what they get in return? To say that Cuban doctors are using Ghanaian patients as guinea pigs is revolting to say the least. Dr. Siribour are you a Christian by any God forsaken chance? If you can say things like this then I fear for your own patients. I dare you as the General Secretary of the GMA to institute a mechanism to invite and assess reports of what Ghanaians themselves think about Ghanaian doctors and you will be shocked – to say the least.

In the same way that most Ghanaians are subdued from protesting and striking against the unending deplorable conditions of life against our govts, Ghanaians are in like manner, emotionally restrained from openly castigating doctors for the many flagrant abuses of basic medical healthcare we suffer at their hands which also cause so many unnecessary deaths. Suffice it to say, some of the accounts flowing in the public domain about the non-performance of some Ghanaian doctors, are indistinguishable from some pages out of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous horror films. Dr Siribour you have opened a can of worms and if I were you, I would quietly close it and end the matter now and forever. Already the sympathies of the Ghanaian public are not on your side in this strike matter. They, rightly or wrongly, think that you are only trying to squeeze more money out of govt only to subsidize your exclusive false and blatantly preposterous elitist standard of life at our expense.

Dr Siribour can you imagine what the health delivery system would have been like if Cuban doctors had not continuously been here to help us since our independence? Which doctors would have gone to take care of our brothers and sisters in the rural areas where Ghanaian doctors have persistently refused to go to in their own country? More than half of the total number of doctors trained in Ghana since the early sixties have on various spurious pretexts shamefully absconded and turned their backs on their own country to seek what they call greener pastures abroad. They think – and it has become a professional stigma, that the country that ‘born them’, the country that bred them and the country that trained them to become doctors is not good enough for them to waste their time on. Then when others who are evidently better doctors than them because they behave like doctors – humble, patriotic, appreciative, caring, unassuming, unpretentious, obliging and approachable, you say what? Remorselessly and at a whim, these mercenaries, at the drop of a hat, abandon the very same people who made their medical training possible, to wallow and die in the pervading diseases of poverty and misery in Ghana. Dr Siribour don’t go there at all. From your utterances, it seems to me that you are not a very well informed or matured person and it is a pity. You are definitely not the right man for the position you are holding. It is too big and delicate for your kind to handle. You will put your colleagues to shame if you don’t straighten up.

Before I end, I would like to take this opportunity to straighten out a few facts on the table. Contrary to the vile imperialist spun propaganda that doctors trained in Cuba or indeed in any other country other than the West, are of inferior quality, I as well as many other Ghanaians can attest and give endless thanks to the incomparable efficiency of Cuban doctors. Then again, Cuba, in spite of all her economic and political difficulties as a fellow developing country, is a country that is recognized by even the imperialist manipulated World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the most efficient countries in the world, in terms of meticulous and professional health delivery.

Cuba exports more doctors to the rest of the world than those arrogant Western countries who sneer at Cuba’s exceptional medical achievements but cannot match it. Cuba has trained virtually gratis, many hundreds of Ghanaian doctors and many more thousands of medical staff including doctors for various African and Latin American countries. In fact they in the West are probably the greatest recipients of Cuban trained medical personnel. Even us here in Ghana, thanks to Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s far-reaching socialist policies that founded and created the Ghana Medical School single-handedly without foreign consultants and ridiculous loans and grants, we have been able to provide the West with more doctors and nurses than they have ever and will ever provide us. These are the kind of truths that we should know about ourselves and of the world – not the silly self-deprecating BBC, CNN, SKY, Al Jazeera fabrications that are fed us daily and which we choose to hold onto, live with and run with - and which ultimately, has only combined to confine us at the point where we were stranded in 1966.

Whilst Western medical institutions and Israel were operating secret laboratories with the Apartheid South African govt to find ways and means to reduce to near extinction, the strategic numerical superiority of the Black race, Cuban doctors way back then were in the jungles of Africa as medical support staff alongside many African heroes and liberation fighters who were fighting for the liberation and the independence of Black Africa. Many thousands of Cubans died in this pursuit to rid Africa and the world, of the evil blight of colonial and imperialist fascism. We owe Cuban doctors and the nation of Cuba more than a debt of gratitude. Obviously you, Dr Siribour, are also either a vector or a victim of this dangerous imperialist propaganda whose only aim is to make target countries and people(s) – particularly Africans, increasingly poorer, more confused, more obtuse and therefore more dependent on the excessively gluttonous West.

I will again take this opportunity to advise the Ghana Medical Association as well as all other professional bodies in this country that they should be wary of the kind of people they elect as leaders. Any Ghanaian professional association that elects people who are not sufficiently diplomatic in their public posture nor politically conscious in favor of Africans and the prime interests of Africa in their thinking, can, in spite of all good intentions, bring far-reaching havoc, decline and disrepute to their professional image and aspirations.

Whilst awaiting Siribours public apology, I will encourage the Ghana Medical Association to continue with their strike action on behalf of all Ghanains until those blood-sucking half-wits and nincompoops in Parliament and in undeserved ministerial positions, realize that they are not exclusively exalted to enjoy the concealed wealth of this country and we will not countenance their brazen and ongoing efforts to assume the reprehensible posture of a colonial govt.