By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 10, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

If the government is intent on bringing in foreign doctors to replace our striking ones, then it had better make sure the scabbing foreign doctors are afforded the exact same dismal conditions of service because of which the members of the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) embarked on their industrial action (See "Nunoo-Mensah To Doctors: Resign But Hand Over Your Bungalow Keys" Kasapafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/10/15). The government should also understand that any attempt to destroy our nation's medical schools, as such action would would be tantamount to, would necessitate President Mahama and his cabinet being put on trial for war crimes and genocide.

I have already advised retired Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah to stay home and babysit his grandchildren; and so I shall not waste much time on him, except to have him answer the question of whether the tens of hundreds of innocent Ghanaian citizens summarily executed by both the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), of which latter junta he was a cabinet member, were ever brought back to life or their families and relatives ever compensated for such gross human rights violations.

What I am simply implying here is that grizzled reprobates like Brig.-Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, who have absolutely no regard for human life and dignity, except their own and those of their relatives and close friends and associates, should not presume to lecture anybody on the value of human lives. They should also have some sense of self-respect and national dignity, and not take the facile and unintelligent attitude of importing foreign doctors to take care of Ghanaian patients. The former Chief of the Defense Staff also has no right to ask striking doctors intent on resigning their posts, in the event of the government's refusal to meet their conditions of service, to hand over the keys to their state-owned bungalows. That decision and authority belong to President John Dramani Mahama. If he wants to assume such authority, let him run for the presidency and stop making a nuisance of himself.

We must also quickly point out that all state properties are the properties of all Ghanaian taxpayers, including the doctors on strike, and not the properties of superannuated bullies like Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah. What we also need to be asking is why doctors who are far better trained and educated than the overwhelming majority of members of the Mahama cabinet, who are hardly competent, as evidenced by their virtual grinding of our statal apparatus to a halt, should be living high on the proverbial hog, while our doctors get paid like college dropouts.

We must, once again, underscore the fact that most of us avid observers of the national political scene are not the least bit humored by the decision of the doctors to embark on strike, but we also want to wean the Mahama government, as well as all subsequent governments, off the neocolonialist and parasitic arrangement whereby political appointees and ruling party hacks live ostentatiously above their means, while those who are actually the backbone of the country's survival and development are scarcely able to eke out a decent livelihood. Needless to say, it is this depraved culture of faux-socialist executive exploitation of the hardworking Ghanaian civil servant that has engendered our present decadent regime of abusive leaders.

Then also, why is the government having such an extremely difficult time migrating all civil and public servants onto the so-called Single-Spine Salary System, but for the stark fact that too many political appointees have been reaping bountifully where they never sowed?

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