He has the especial privilege of hiring and firing any number of his ministerial and nonministerial executive appointees whenever and for whatever reason or reasons that the President, Mr. John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, may deem appropriate. Which is why it may very well be too early or premature to speculate about the reason and/or reasons for which Dr. Nuhu Zakaria, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana National Ambulance Service (NAS), was recently fired by the President for reasons that some political pundits and analysts have attributed to Dr. Zakaria’s widely alleged misuse of academic and/or professional credentials that he may not have credibly or properly earned (See “President Mahama Fires CEO of National Ambulance Service Nuhu Zakaria” Modernghana.com 7/9/25).
Recently, it has come to light that far too many Mahama executive appointees may be misappropriating academic titles and professional credentials that they may not have either properly or legitimately earned through hard work or heavy intellectual lifting, as it were, or cranial exertion, as we often say hereabouts in the United States of America. The source of the apparent problem of downright too many Mahama-appointed CEOs literally wearing oversized academic and professional credentials may very well be due to the fact of the President’s seeming to be inordinately addicted to the diarrheal appointment of far too many university professors and lecturers in his government and cabinet, almost as if the mere recruitment and the appointment of people with such titles as “Professor” and “Doctor” is all that the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, requires to rapidly move the country and the nation’s economy up the global development ladder and index.
Which may also very well be exactly why Mr. Mahama recently revoked his appointment of one Ms. Anne Sansa Daly, a Ghanaian-born longtime resident of the United States who is widely alleged to have acquired the professionally marginal degree or certification of a Home-Health Aide, to membership of the Board-of-Directors of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA). Evidently, Ms. Daly had been successfully posing as a Board-Certified US-trained Medical Doctor and is even reported to have been hosting a health-related television program in Accra, Ghana’s capital, for quite a considerable while.
According some observers, Ms. Daly’s professionally unverified appointment was the most embarrassing action that the former Arch-Lieutenant to the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills has had to take in recent months, that is, with the exception of the legions of national contretemps for which the Russian-trained Communication Propaganda Expert has already made himself and the nation so globally infamous. Under such climate of gross and rampant official mendacity and make-believe, it comes as absolutely nothing flabbergasting or totally out of the ordinary. To be certain, it has effectively become the right and the most appropriate and perfect thing to do.
Now, vis-a-vis the Sansa Daly Affair, as it has become widely known, we learn that this most felonious crime of false pretenses had been literally pulled out of the trickbag of the globally infamous Washington, DC-resident Podcaster and one of the leading Mahama and the National Democratic Congress’ media goons and shills by the name of Mr. Kevin Baidoo Taylor, the nondescript proprietor and operator of a YouTube blog or podcast called “Loud Silence.” Interestingly, ever since the fallout from the Sansa Daly Affair came into the global limelight, the generally lightning-swift Mr. Taylor has yet to come public to explain precisely why he decided to put his widely alleged paymaster through such an excruciatingly opprobrious scam. At least not to the knowledge of Yours Truly, as of this writing.
But, of course, the scapegoat-like removal of Dr. Nuhu Zakaria does little to absolutely nothing to meaningfully and constructively resolve the legion problems plaguing our National Healthcare System. Less than a week ago, as of this writing, for example, the highly avoidable death was reported of an Emergency-Room Physician by the name of Dr. Kwame Adu Ofori – or some such name – at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, in the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi – primarily because of the shameful lack of a catheter, which would have readily enabled his colleagues to have significantly improved the chances of the survival of Dr. Adu Ofori or Ofori Adu who had reportedly suffered a cardiac arrest or what is commonly known as a heart attack.
This otherwise highly avoidable and senseless death has predictably touched off the anger of quite a considerable portion of the nation’s population of some 40-million souls because of the high-profile status of the deceased, equally tragically forgetting or ignoring the grim reality of the fact that hundreds and thousands of Ghanaian citizens who have no highly respectable titles before their names meet their deaths from cardiac arrest every day, and on a minute-by-minute basis, but have not been as fortunate or as professionally privileged as Dr. Adu Ofori to have had their names and deaths broadcasted and extensively written about and disconsolately lamented all across the country and well beyond.
And all for the simple reason of the absence of the relatively cheap availability or the existence of Cardiothoracic Centers of the kind constructed by Dr. Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, Ghana’s most globally renowned cardiologist, at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH), in the nation’s capital of Accra. You see, any serious and progressive 24-Hour Economy-oriented government would have ensured that each and every major hospital in Ghana’s 16 regions, to-date, would be fully equipped with both a Catheter and a Cardiothoracic Center.
Instead, we have the man who previously bankrupted the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) hosting some sumptuous and lavish banquets for a handful of specially selected and politically favored senior citizens, largely political party stalwarts and yes-men and women and some retired National Security Operatives and pontifically promising to put in place a quality-of-life-enhancing policy initiative of the kind implemented by former President Agyekum-Kufuor, such as the much celebrated but tragically short-lived Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program.
Among the Akan ethnic-majority populace of Ghana, there is a maxim or common saying that runs as follows: “If Mr. Naked [or Ms. Naked, for that matter] promises you a bolt of cotton-print, you just have to pay studious attention to his [or her] name.” Ghanaians went into the polling booth on December 7, 2024 and perfectly and predictably unwisely allowed the ballot-snatching leadership and the kleptocratic operatives of the then main opposition National Democratic Congress to literally rig their way back to power and to callously and unconscionably revisit untold misery upon our pates.
And so we are dying in droves for the abject lack of the most basic healthcare tools and necessities, while our superannuated Vice-President, who educated all her three adult children, two sons and a daughter, right here in the United States of America and Canada, in some of the most expensive tertiary academies, was recently jetted abroad on an expensive redeye for the treatment of a common cold. As Ghana’s immortalized and pioneering “Neo-Oral” Poet-Laureate, Prof. (John) Atukwei Okai, wrote in one of his several anthologies of poetry: “This is the world/In which we live/In it.”
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
