AMA Extends Deadline • To Ban Truck Pushing

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri THE ACCRA Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has extended the deadline for banning push trucks in the metropolis from September 15 to September 30, 2011. The change in date comes as a result of a request made by executives of the Trucks Pushers and Truck and Scrap Dealers Associations to the AMA during a meeting in Accra. Lawyer Yaw Twumasi Ankrah, legal officer of the assembly, announcing the new date to the truck pushers, said even though the AMA has granted their request by extending the date, it would be the last. “We were going to enforce it from yesterday, but your executives came to us and pleaded for extension of time.” Lawyer Ankrah therefore noted that the enforcement date will start from 1st October, 2011. This he said was to reduce the reports of accidents caused by push trucks. He further announced the registration and issuance of number plates for the trucks. “The AMA will absorb the cost of the number plates but you will pay the business operating tax of GH¢1 per month,” lawyer Ankrah noted. Furthermore, he indicated that the truck pushers had till the end of September 2011 to finish registration as the assembly had so far registered 500 trucks. Reiterating the earlier plans of the AMA, Lawyer Ankrah said the trucks will be allowed to operate in markets areas but not on major streets and ceremonial roads. “Liberation Circle Roads, Nima High way, Oxford Street, Osu, Roman Ridge Round About, through Roman Catholic Cathedral, Trade Union Congress (TUC) to Old Parliament House are also included,” he said. The legal officer of the assembly observed that any truck pusher who fails to abide by the new rules will be cautioned and then fined if the offence is repeated.

Caption: Nii Armah Ashitey with the members of the Greater Accra House of Chiefs in a group photo.

Postal & Courier Services Membership Increase

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri THE GHANA Post and Private Courier operators recorded an increase in their membership with the registration of seven new private courier firms. The Postal & Courier Services Regulatory Commission, which made this known, said the registration of the new members brings to 70 the number of registered postal & courier firms in the country. Osabarima Ansah Sasraku III, chairman of the board of commissioners, disclosed this at the 4th annual stakeholders’ forum held for postal & courier operators under the theme: “Empowering the Postal & Courier Operator for Efficient Service Delivery” in Accra. In his remarks, the chairman said the increase in the number of registered operators was as a result of vigorous exercise by the commission to ensure that illegal operators were weeded out. Osabarima Ansah Sasraku III outlining the progress of the commission said a new brochure on the processes of acquiring operating licence by prospective postal and courier firms will soon be made available to operators. He also stated that the commission was in the process of launching an aggressive public education and awareness programme. This is to ensure that the existence and functions of the commission were well known to business people. “That campaign will also be used to educate consumers about their rights and obligations.” The board chairman said once the postal system remained the only cost-effective and easily accessible means of communication particularly for people in rural areas, consumers demanded fast and efficient deliveries and therefore any failure on the part of operator could be detrimental to the interest of consumers. He, however, noted that the commission will impose stiffer sanctions against any person, individual or institution that operated a courier business in any country without licence. “We will continue to engage the police to clamp down all illegal operators as such activities do not only constitute punishable offence under the Act 649; they also deprive the state of substantial revenue.” Emmanuel Arthur, Public Relations & Customer Affairs Manager of the commission, said the commission, as part of its efforts towards efficient postal and courier regulation, will organise a consumers’ fora in a year to solicit views from customers. He said members of the service would from next year pay a fine of GH¢100 if they failed to renew their licences without any official notice to the commission. He added that the commission was therefore working assiduously with government to ensure that the country had a vibrant and efficient postal service.

Caption: The chairman of the board of commissioners in a group photograph

Actis, Laurus Break New Grounds

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri Actis, a private equity firm, in conjunction with Boston Investment and Laurus Development Partners, has taken the first step in the Ghanaian real estate industry by breaking the ground for the construction of ‘One Airport Square,’ project in Accra. The project, designed by award winning Italian Architect Mario Cucinella, is destined to become the number one corporate and most environmentally friendly complex in the country. The complex, located in Accra’s growing commercial district at the airport city, will comprise nine floors of office space and 2,000 square meters of retail including European-style cafes, shops and bars, serving as a social gathering point for social residents, office workers and visitors.

David Morley, Head of Real Estate at Actis, said the building has specifications such as natural ventilation via the central atrium, rain water recycling and concrete overhangs which prevent over- heating and lower energy consumption. “The floors are raised, parking is ample, floor plates are large and flexible, health and safety is of an international standard,” Morley said. He also stated that the building when completed will enable Ghanaians to work and relax in the heart of the city. Carlo Matta, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Laurus, said the building’s unique look was inspired by Ghanaian traditional patterns. He observed that the during the construction, the project will employ over 150 Ghanaian construction workers, adding that it will source more than 40 percent of all materials locally in order to help stimulate the regional economy. Matta also indicated that One Airport Square is a great example of how mixing Ghanaian expertise and international best practices can achieve outstanding results. “We hope this project will set a new standard in the country’s real estate industry.” The building, estimated to cost between $55 and $60 million, is expected to be completed in May 2013.

“Every day, some children die here.”

Inside the Korle Bu children’s Ward Story by Jamila Akweley Okertchiri

Georgina Afum sits confused and helpless as she wipes saliva from her five-year-old son, Gideon Sam, who lies helpless on one of the few beds in the children’s emergency ward of the Korle Bu children’s hospital. His body trembles uncontrollably every few minutes and stops only after discharging saliva from his mouth. Even though the nurses had given him medication, his condition remains unchanged, as he has the seizure every few minutes. “Three days ago his body temperature rose, so I bath him and gave him Para,” she says. “The following day, at about 12 noon, his temperature rose again, so I bath him and gave him Para. He ate and went out to play. But about seven o’clock in the evening, he had convulsion.” She took him to a clinic, was given medication, and then took him home again. But the convulsions persisted. She took him back to the clinic and was referred to Korle Bu, which is a tertiary facility, part of Ghana’s three-tier hospital structure. “The convulsion is now coming continuously,” she says, “and I don’t know what to do.” She says she has National Health Insurance (NHIS), but has not renewed it and will have to pay the hospital. Sickness And Poverty According to Professor Bamenla Goka, Head of Department of Child Health at Korle Bu, sicknesses are common in people with poor backgrounds because of their living conditions. She says poor people are more vulnerable to infections that can damage the organs in the body, like the heart and kidneys. Complicating the picture is the high cost of health care for people without NHIS. They will often try a number of home remedies before taking their child to hospital. “Many of the illnesses we see are related to poverty in one way or the other,” Prof. Goka says, “and because their parents do not have the financial means, they tend to wait and try alternate forms of care because they are afraid of the hospital bills. And when those alternate forms don’t work, then they try to come to the hospital.”

Theresa Mensah is the mother of eight-year-old Christopher Mensah, who is suffering from an unknown ailment. His face is puffy and swollen. “He came home one day from school and I saw that he had rashes on his skin,” his mother says. “So I gave him a painkiller.” She waited two days, and the swelling continued. She took him to a doctor at Boadua, in Asamankese area, and they were transferred to Kade to see another doctor. According to Theresa, who is a farmer from Asamankese, they stayed for three months at the hospital at Kade before they were referred to Korle Bu. “The doctor said the ailment has reached a critical stage,” she says, “and they needed to conduct a test, which the hospital doesn’t have the machine for.” Prof. Goka expressed worry over the amount of time it takes guardians and parents to bring their children to the hospital. She said a lot of children are brought in almost dead because their guardians do not realize how seriously ill they are. “Every day, some children die here,” she says. “Over 80 per cent of the children who die here die within 24 hours of getting here. This we call, ‘brought-in-dead-people.’”

Dr. Afisah Zakariah is the head of the Policy Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate of the Ministry of Health. She seems surprised at Prof. Goka’s claim. “This is sad,” she says. “Maybe what we have to do is audit child death so that we actually see what is going on. It is good this has come up if every day we lose a child then we have to sit up.” Dr. Zakariah says there are many policies in place to ensure the health security of children, whether rich or poor. “We give the pregnant women tetanus vaccination because some deliver at home or with a traditional birth assistant,” she says. “So we try to protect them against tetanus, including their babies. And when the children are born, we give the children nine antigens by the time they attain one year.” Those antigens include diphtheria, TB vaccine, polio vaccine, hepatitis B, yellow fever, and measles. She said the ministry plans to introduce vaccines for rotavirus and pneumonia next year. These, she stressed, are free. “The other thing we are struggling with now is malaria,” she adds. “It is endemic here, and we are trying multiple approaches to solve the situation.” She said the ministry promotes insecticide-treated bed nets and combination therapy. They also use an indoor spray that kills mosquito larvae. However, recently studies suggest that treated bed nets are not potent to tame thae mosquitoes. General Challenges In Child Health Although Dr. Zakariah says NHIS covers all of Ghana’s poor people, some residents go without, as did Georgina Afum, who forgot to renew it. Prof. Goka says such situations are common, and parents therefore have to pay for medical treatment. Even for those who have health insurance, services such as MRI scans are not covered. “Now, health care is not free,” says Prof. Goka. “If you don’t pay for the health care yourself, then somebody else is paying for it, either the government or some form of insurance will be paying for it.” Prof. Goka notes that even for those who are paying cash and carry, the fees are highly subsidized. “So the health institutions are not really run on fees that are charged to patients, because they are really far below what is required to provide the direct care that the patient needs and at the same time buy equipment and all that to use for the patients.” According to Prof. Goka, this makes it difficult for individual facilities like Korle-Bu to generate their own revenue through service delivery. She says the hospital endures a shortage of equipment. Sometimes, only one piece of equipment is available throughout the whole hospital, and it will break down a lot because it is overused. She also says patients are occasionally sent outside Korle Bu for tests, which drive costs up further. But Dr. Zakariah says Korle-Bu is just one of many agencies in the Ministry of Health. It has its own chief executive officer, its own financial means, and its own priorities. They manage their resources themselves,” she says. “So they can choose to buy equipment if they want. It depends on the area they want to invest in. We don’t take the money from them. They pay directly. When they take care of the patients, all they do is submit claims to national health insurance authority, which is also an agency under the Ministry of Health, and then they will reimburse them the money.” Dr. Zakariah also says a needs assessment was done with Ghanaian hospitals last year, including Korle-Bu. The assessment has so far produced equipment for hospitals in seven regions, though not yet Greater Accra Region. That, says the Ministry of Health, will come next year. “We definitely cannot do that with cash and carry and NHIS fees that are paid to us,” says Prof. Goka. “So for us to take care of children there has to be additional money for us to take care of the infrastructure and equipment. For example, right now our emergency room is in a very bad state. We know the government is aware of this. But we’ve been waiting for years, and we want a change now.” The Korle Bu Children’s Emergency Unit The emergency unit, which acts as a resuscitation point for every child brought in, is small, dark with very few beds and packed with patients and their parents. “We have lots of problems here,” says a senior nurse who wants to remain anonymous. “When there are emergencies, all hands are on deck. Bring plaster, cotton. You are turning here and there. At the end of the day, when you sit down, you then start feeling pains all over your body. “Sometime when I remove this shoe,” she elaborates, “I cannot even walk home; I just try to take one step at a time like a baby crawling because I have been running too much. When I manage to get home, I can’t sleep. I don’t know why I can’t sleep. I just feel like sleeping but I can’t sleep.” She complains about the way parents treat nurses, saying they don’t understand what goes into health care and they too often complicate the situation by avoiding hospitals. “We are few in this place but we work hard. The parents of the children do not appreciate our work. The public should know that when their child is sick, they should come to the right place.” Despite that aversion, the emergency room is often packed with patients. There can be several to a bed, says the nurse, a reflection of the whole children’s ward, which has 250 beds and runs, according to Prof. Goka, at 120 per cent capacity. “This place is very hectic,” the senior nurse says. “The beds are very few. We need new beds and the place must be expanded. Sometimes, when it comes to epidemic like cholera, we are forced to pile as many as six, sometimes eight, children on two beds because we make sure every child that is brought here gets the first resuscitation treatment before they are sent to the wards.” Whether or not Korle-Bu sets its own priorities, Dr. Zakariah agrees with Prof. Goka on the state of the emergency unit. “The emergency ward is small and crowded,” she says. According to the senior nurse, morale in the emergency unit is ‘zero.’ She goes on at length about the delay of her Single Spine Salary (SSS) transfer, a complaint that Dr. Zakariah says nearly brings tears to her eyes. “We all want higher salaries, but at times we should do a little bit of analysis,” she says, asserting that 95 per cent of the country’s health budget goes to salaries. “Maybe they don’t know the amount that is paid for salaries, but objectively they know that what they take home at the end of the year is much better than what the civil servants take home.” It’s entirely possible, says Dr. Zakariah, that nurses will see their salaries cut when the SSS policy takes effect. Government’s Role The Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Ghana is a signatory, has a provision guaranteeing health care for children. Children’s health also figures prominently in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which Ghana has also signed. Finally, chapter 34 (2) of the Constitution also guarantees the right to good health care. “Children’s health should be given priority,” says Prof. Goka. “It should not all be lumped together with adult problems.” She says if the country has healthy children then actually, “we will have healthy adults and we will spend less on covering adult issues.” She notes that many of the diseases such as, hypertension and diabetes can be traced back to childhood ailments that were not fully treated. “Paying attention to people’s education, housing, food availability, and environmental sanitation will all help to keep people healthy and reduce the need for curative services,” she adds. Dr. Zakariah says the Ministry of Health is very active in Ghana, and that all of its agencies work hard. She takes pride in the country’s battle against guinea worm, which the vice president recently called a categorical success. Even though recent indicates that guinea worms eradication was far from over in the country. She also underscores the country’s success in the fight against HIV/AIDS, saying the prevalence rate is now 1.5 per cent, down from 2.9 in recent years. As for covering MRI scans and similar procedures, she says the NHIS is a creature of tax revenue. “We started by covering almost 95 per cent of the diseases we have,” she says, “and so the load on the insurance is quite heavy, and the majority of the people are in the exempt category: Children below eight years of age, those above 70 years, the very poor in society, pregnant women.” Prof. Goka agrees that NHIS is a powerful tool in the country’s health care system. It should only be improved, she says, never scrapped. “And with that,” she says, “we note that effort has been made to make access for children under the age of 5 easier under the National Health Insurance, and they are the children who are most at risk.” She wants to see children 12 years and under receive the same status. She would also like to see the scope of services covered widened. “We think the that government should subsidize the care of the children in another way, form another source, so that we can actually have the equipment and all that we need to work with,” she says. Dr. Zakariah says the government has a series of programs in place to attract donations and partnerships with third parties, like corporations and NGOs. “That is one of our core mandates,” she says. “Resource mobilization, planning, monitoring and evaluation. And we budget for that. “So we have the government side and the non-government side. We have development partners and other individuals donating things to the health sector of Ghana.”

Muslims Donate to Save 1 Year Old Bintu

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri

THE MUSLIM congregation of Dare Salam Mosque situated within the Airport Residential area has donated an estimated GH¢8,000 to Bintu Fatima Ibrahim, a one year ten month old baby, who has a complex hole-in-heart condition.
The donation was to enable Fatima undergo a second operation in order to correct her condition called ‘Tetralogy of Fallot.’
Sheikh Armiya’u, substantive Imam of the Mosque, said the donation was in response to a publication in DAILY GUIDE captioned: “1 Year Old Bintu Needs Help.”
It may be recalled in that publication that Dr. M. Tamatey of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital’s Cardiothoracic Centre, signed a statement to appeal for funds for Bintu Fatima Ibrahim.
The statement said Bintu had had her first operation and requires a second and final open-heart operation costing GH¢24,000 to correct all the defects.
She was required to pay GH¢12,000 while the Ghana Heart foundation opted to pay 50 percent of the total cost.
Sheikh Armiya’u said the congregation of Dare Salam therefore launched an appeal and dedicated a whole sermon to the plight of Fatima Ibrahim which enabled them raise the money.
He stated that they were happy to associate themselves with a value that is upheld in the month of Ramadan “and that is the value of giving to the poor and needy and being compassionate to the weak.”
He further hoped the token donation will bring relief to the little child.

Doctor Lawrence Sereboe, Cardiothoracic surgeon, at the National Cardiothoracic Center who received the donation thanked the team on behalf of Fatima’s family.
“This will help her have a normal, quality life expectancy so when groups, individuals and benevolent organisations come to the aid of these children then we know that it is an investment in their lives,” he said.
He said the donation will aid in settling the required GH¢12,000 after the Ghana Heart Foundation paid 50 percent of the total cost.
Dr. Sereboe said the amount will cater for the cost of surgery, anesthesia, intensive care and accommodation for Fatima.

Lutheran Church Ordains New Pastor

By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri

THE EVANGELICAL Lutheran Church, Ghana has officially ordained Nicholas Salifu as its pastor in a colorful ceremony held at the St. Paul Lutheran Church, Kanda.
The ordination ceremony performed by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Paul Kofi Fynn, President of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ghana, was graced by hundreds of people across the country.
The new pastor joins the existing team of pastors at the church in their pastoral ministry as preachers of the Good News.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church is the largest protestant church in the world founded by Martin Luther King Jr. after breaking away from the Catholic Church in 1521.

Rt. Rev. Fynn stressed the need for pastors to be circumspect in their dealings with their members.
He said they should lead exemplary lives using the Bible as their yardstick.
In his acceptance speech, Pastor Nicholas Salifu pledged to preach the gospel in its totality as he shepherds the flock of Christ.
Many well-wishers presented gifts to Pastor Salifu and prayed for God’s guidance and blessing as he embarks on his pastoral journey.
Nicholas Salifu joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1971. In 1978, he was sent to the Lutheran Church Seminary in Nigeria for four years after which he went to the University of Ghana, Legon where he read sociology and religion.
After his first degree, he was sent to Bawku in the Upper East Region where he opened several congregations and translated the catechism into the Kusa language for the people in the region.
Pastor Salifu was then sent to the US to undertake a Master of Divinity programme at the St. Luis Seminary after working for a while in Bawku.