By Kofi Akordor
Ghanaians are passionate about committees and they do not hesitate to form one at the least opportunity. A worker is caught with a company laptop hidden under his armpit outside the company premises. This is a clear case of stealing but company disciplinary procedure demands that the police must not come in, so a committee of inquiry must be constituted to probe the suspected stealing of one laptop.
The committee may take days, weeks or even months to complete its work at the expense of productivity. Big money, probably exceeding the cost of the computer, may be spent feeding and refreshing committee members if the company is well-endowed. The end result may be a warning, suspension or outright dismissal. The company could have been saved time and money if the matter were treated with dispatch.
A security man is found heavily sedated with alcohol while on duty. A committee is hurriedly set up to investigate the matter. The committee, among other things, will find out whether truly the man took excess alcohol, the type and volume of alcohol consumed and finally recommend appropriate disciplinary measures to be taken.
At the corporate level, committees are not about disciplinary matters alone. There are new products to be launched, anniversaries to be celebrated and projects to be inaugurated. In all cases, committees must be set to plan activities in connection with these events.
There was this organisation which was preparing to inaugurate its new office building. There was as usual a planning committee with its subsets. For almost a year members of this committee and its subsets met on regular basis during which they had to abandon their regular work in the office. Crates of soft drinks went down the patchy throats of committee members while fried rice and chicken filled their tummies. A simple event was made complex. On the inauguration day, the programme which took over a year to plan did not take more than 30 minutes. Disappointingly, most of the invited guests including the Guest of Honour did not turn up.
The Ghanaian’s love for committees is in full evidence at the family level too. A relation is dead then there is a big committee with various subcommittees to plan an elaborate burial and funeral rites. These committees meet several times at different locations at the expense of private and public business until the D-day. The same committee and its subcommittees are revived when there is a wedding of a family member with little variation, depending on previous performance.
One institution which cannot be matched when it comes to committees is the Government of Ghana. If corporate institutions and families are passionate about committees, our governments are crazy about them. A government will be failing in its responsibilities if it fails to establish one committee or another at the least opportunity. It could be a one-man committee or a multi-member committee, sometimes with the power of a high court.
Sometimes committees are set up to probe or review the findings or recommendations of other committees. You may say the whole government machinery is surviving on committees.
Committees themselves are not bad. They are necessary in some cases to help the government have a clear picture of a situation, an event, an occurrence, a phenomenon, an accident, or a scandal so as to make it take a decision or an action which final goal is to remove a problem and make things better. In short, under certain circumstances, committees could not be avoided, since without them, no firm and fair decision or action could be taken.
However, the zeal and alacrity with which committees are formed in this country are increasingly making some of us to feel that the committees have become the solution to our problems and not the means to solving those problems.
We all know, or at least those who should know, the problems associated with transportation on the Volta Lake. We know that the Volta Lake Transport Company (VLTC), a subsidiary of the Volta River Authority (VRA), which has been mandated to operate water transportation on the Volta Lake, has woefully failed in its mandate. We also know that the Volta Lake is full of tree stumps which are dangerous to navigation on the lake.
We also know that the Ghana Maritime Authority (GMA), which has regulatory control over navigation on the lake, operates mainly in the media, having very little control, if any, over what happens on the vast lake. This has given room to private boat operators to do their own thing on the lake, paying very little attention to safety rules. The only time we hear of its Chief Executive very loud in the media is when there is another disaster on the lake resulting in the loss of precious lives.
All these factors have combined to make transportation on the Volta Lake unsafe and dangerous. So why the rush to set up committees to investigate accidents on the lake anytime there is one, when the causes of the accidents are obviously known to those who should know?
The latest of such accidents occurred on October 19, 2009, in which at least 20 people lost their lives. As usual, the government’s reaction was to set up a probe into the accident. The solution to accidents on the Volta Lake has been pushed into the background until another accident occurs.
On October 21, 2009, personnel of the Ghana National Fire Service watched with frustrated impotence as the multi-storey building belonging to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was totally consumed by fire because the service lacks the necessary equipment to fight fire in high-rise buildings. A committee, as would be expected, went into action and came out with the obvious conclusions.
One, there was an electrical fault which triggered the fire. Two, there was no internal mechanism to detect and stop the fire from spreading. Three, the GNFS is not equipped to handle fire outbreaks in tall buildings. Apart from the need to establish criminality or otherwise, everything else is common knowledge.
The case of mental health in Ghana is widely known and well documented. Dr J.B. Asare, the former Chief Psychiatrist, had spoken about the state of our psychiatric hospitals in the country at every opportunity and written enough about them to stretch from Elubo to Hamile, without any appreciable response.
Dr Akwasi Osei, the man currently in charge of mental health in the country and who operates from the Accra Psychiatry Hospital at Adabraka in Accra, has not relented in his effort to get the Mental Health Bill passed into law. He has not stopped to tell the world about the deplorable and unsecured conditions under which the health workers operate at the medical facility. He has not hidden the truth from those who should care and act about the deprivations the inmates of the psychiatric hospital are going through, especially with regard to poor feeding and lack of medications.
Dr Osei and others continue to remind the government and others who matter that health workers in the psychiatric field are woefully inadequate in relation to the number of Ghanaians who suffer one form of psychiatric ailment or another. We have been told that relatives have abandoned the people they brought to the facility for treatment even though these patients have shown remarkable improvement and only need family support for full recovery. These patients have also added to the congestion being experienced at the hospital.
Dr Osei and others have made it public several times that because of inadequate funding, the hospital could not provide adequate security at the hospital, thus exposing the inmates and workers to danger and abuse. They gave a catalogue of other inadequacies including an ambulance for emergencies, transportation for the staff and incentives to motivate the few nurses still at post.
Governments have come and gone without responding to the lamentations of Dr Osei and those before him. Suddenly, our new government has found a solution. The setting up of a committee to investigate issues raised by a colleague, Anas Aremeyaw-Anas, who booked into the Accra Psychiatric Hospital as a mental patient. Aremeyaw-Anas would not have worried himself with admission procedure at the Pantang Hospital. He would have just walked about naked and mingled with the patients for a few hours and come to appreciate how shabbily we have treated mental health in this country. If the Accra Psychiatric Hospital in the heart of Accra is open, Pantang, which is on the outskirts of Accra, sandwiched between Adenta and Abokobi, is a Wild West: A jungle of abandoned and uncompleted buildings, bad roads and poor facilities. It is a forgotten territory.
What has Aremeyaw-Anas discovered that was not known previously? Nothing! Instead of a wasteful committee that would come back and tell us nothing new, the government should have plunged straight into serious action by picking the problems and solving them one by one.
We could have started by sending more bags of rice and maize to the hospital kitchen. A new ambulance, the cost of which cannot cripple our economy, should have been dispatched to the hospital by now, while immediate measures are taken to provide enough security at preventing marauders and other miscreants from invading the hospital premises.
While these interim measures are being taken, the government must begin to look at the service conditions of mental health workers generally and improve conditions in our psychiatry hospitals country-wide. The long-term solution is for the government to take interest in the Mental Health Bill and make sure it is passed into law within the shortest possible time so that other things will follow.
Committees as in the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Volta Lake disaster and Foreign Affairs building cases do not help matters. They only delay the solution to the real issues which themselves are never addressed. It is like we are being fed on a daily diet of committees, some of whose reports were never given any attention by the authorities which set them up. We could do with less of these committees and concentrate on removing those things which bring about the setting up of those committees.
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogpot.com
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