By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 1, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
If the striking "junior" doctors are able to carry through with their mass resignation threat, in direct response to abysmal working conditions, it would be the most significant milestone since Ghana's declaration of its sovereignty in 1957. For now, I would like to briefly comment on a few demands made by the doctors which have raised the hackles, predictably, of our parasitic and scam-artist politicians. The demand by the doctors for 80-100 gallons of petrol is quite in order, if "talk-show" journalists like Messrs. Kwesi Pratt and Ben Ephson, among a slew of others, are receiving free petrol from the government.
Then you also have President John Mahama jetting around the globe indiscriminately, almost as if he is the owner of Texaco. And so it is characteristically idiotic for Mr. Abraham Amaliba to ask whether the striking doctors intend to set up gas/filling stations with their ration demand (See "Are Doctors Going To Operate Filling Stations With New Fuel Demands? Amaliba Asks" Modernghana.com 8/31/15). Maybe somebody ought to remind the National Democratic Congress' shill that if parliamentarians and other politicians with far less academic and professional training than these doctors deem it to be appropriate, and even necessary, to own and operate filling stations, what makes these doctors any less deserving?
Then also, just what makes Mr. Amaliba suppose that these doctors would have to build filling stations in their homes? Are the filling stations owned by some of our greedy parliamentarians located in their homes? How stupid could this Mahama propagandist be? I have known for quite sometime that stupidity is Mr. Amaliba's calling card, but at least I expected that as a lawyer, this NDC talk-show fixture would have matured by now to recognize the exigencies of the times, if he were the serious politician that he would have the rest of Ghanaians believe he is. I also find every allowance demanded by the doctors to be quite positively comparable to those perks already received and enjoyed by members of the three branches of government.
Mr. Amaliba not only claims that the demands by the doctors are "outrageous," he also scandalously claims that every college-educated Ghanaian made an independent choice of his/her profession, and so doctors should accept their shabby treatment by dumb-ass politicians like Mr. Amaliba and his paymasters because, somehow, in opting to become doctors, these first-responders and frontline life-savers had also consented to a second-class citizenship status. At any rate, who told Mr. Amaliba that becoming a politician is any genuine career choice, or an occupation demanding of much cranial exertion or brain power?
Indeed, there are countries where the bulk of parliamentarians and cabinet and judicial appointees come from the best-educated social class, and have also distinguished themselves in the traditional professions. But not in Ghana. In Ghana, it looks as if politics is a get-rich-quick avenue for many of the most ill-educated, greedy and primitive of citizens. An NDC-affiliated apparatchik like Dr. Edward Omane-Boamah, who have been appointed to cabinet portfolios over which they have little talent, expertise and competence, are in politics more for the fat paychecks and royally comfortable service conditions, and not primarily because they have anything meaningful or productive to offer by way of our national development effort.
Here in the United States, for example, you would never have any president, even the most lackluster president, appoint a physician with absolutely no training in public relations or communications as his press secretary or communications minister. Or an average lawyer as his health minister. Indeed, if anybody really wants to understand the causes of the grinding poverty and political regression afflicting our beloved nation, this is where such search ought to begin.
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