By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
Nobody would tell him, so I have to step in and drag him by the scruff in front of the mirror. I am talking about the former National Democratic Congress' Member of Parliament for Adentan Constituency, Accra-Central, Mr. Kwadwo Adu-Asare. He is part of the problem; that is, part of the reason why our doctors are not being paid their well-deserved salaries and perks. Mr. Adu-Asare is a veritable parasite who was removed from his job some time ago, as head of a public service agency, for gross administrative incompetence.
But instead of sending him home or back to school and making his salary available to a more competent employee, President John Dramani Mahama decided to send him back to the Flagstaff house, where the most incompetent NDC operatives are housed, overfed and overpaid while most hardworking Ghanaian civil servants are barely able to keep their heads above the Stygian economic bog-peat created by the Mahama government.
Thus, for example, when Mr. Elvis Afriyie-Ankrah, the hare-brained former Sports Minister, epically and indelibly humiliated Ghana at the 2014 Brazil-hosted World Cup, including wanton indulgence in criminal embezzlement, Little Dramani's most logical response was to recall him to the Flagstaff House to greedily feast among the hoodlum ratpack. And so I don't know what business Mr. Adu-Asare thinks he has, trying to wax self-righteous and pontifical about the striking doctors who have every right - even as their critic does not - to demand livable conditions of service.
Now, don't get me wrong, dear reader, I am in no way favorably disposed towards the industrial action of these doctors. At least not in principle. What I resent, though, is to see and hear the very people who have created such a mess presuming to score cheap political points from the same. Even when the country's healthcare system enjoyed its Golden Age in the 1960s and 70s, the working conditions of our doctors were not exactly roseate. But they were not this execrably unseemly either. The economy was then much better managed by people who really knew a thing or two about how to manage the affairs of a country with a rich and prestigious ancient history like Ghana.
Mr. Adu-Asare fatuously claims that the striking doctors are insensitive and unconscionable; and also that by striking, these doctors are punishing the ordinary citizens who pay their salaries, and not comfortably situated political scam-artists like President Mahama and himself. On the latter score, of course, he is right, except that he predictably fails to tell his audience that they are actually being punished by the overfed and arrogant parasitic ratpack called Presidential Staffers and hangers-on like Mr. Adu-Asare.
He could have also, for good measure, added that when Little Dramani and his overpaid muggers and pickpockets fall under the weather, it is to developed capitalist democracies like South Africa, Western Europe and the United States that they go for treatment. Which is precisely why even the best equipped Ghanaian hospitals look like graveyards. In other words, aside from such basic issues as salaries, perks and pension plans, these doctors ought to be striking as well for better medical equipment and medical supplies. Mr. Adu-Asare also gives quite an interesting insight into the mindset of the parasitic residents of the Flagstaff House; which is that as long as they feel themselves and their immediate family members, relatives and friends to be largely unaffected by the strike, they intend to play hard ball.
In other words, it all boils down to a drawnout showdown or war-of-attrition in which either party attempts to outlast the other. And so the public tough-talk is likely to go on for quite awhile. I also don't know, by the way, who Mr. Adu-Asare thinks he is fooling - the ordinary Ghanaian taxpayer or himself and his ilk - by farcically claiming that it is only the striking doctors whose salaries are paid by the ordinary Ghanaian worker, and not political scam-artists like Mr. Adu-Asare, himself, and his paymasters and fellow robber-barons.
Well, if, even as he smugly exhorts, the striking doctors decide to go back to work tomorrow morning in deference to their Hippocratic Oath, precisely what kind of oath need the rest of us invoke to get Little Dramani and his freeloading minions to resort to a conscientious application of the Golden Rule?
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