A few days ago, a friend sadly told me about how his brother’s son has suddenly fallen sick—so bad that he has grown unreasonably thin within a short period. The child was in unending pain, he said.
When I asked him what the cause was and whether he was responding to treatment, he said he had been referred to Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Ghana’s largest and flagship health centre.
However, that wasn’t all, at Korle-Bu, they’ve been told that a certain medical testing needs to be carried out to ascertain what the problem is but samples of the child’s blood must be flown to South Africa, where the needed medical equipment for the testing can be found.
I thought the child’s case was special, an isolated case which Korle-Bu was not placed to deal with. But I soon learnt that the South Africa medical testing is nothing special, it’s, in fact, common at Korle-Bu and numerous people seeking health care have had to do this.
So I asked myself this: a whole country that’s able to spend millions of dollars on football (which is largely a luxury), recently spent about 72 million dollars on SSNIT’s database software and has paid millions of dollars in wrong judgement debts to people we are unable to retrieve the money from cannot afford to provide a single holistic home based healthcare centre for its citizens and no one in authority seems to think there’s something wrong with this.

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