Minority NDC
It is unfortunate that primitive thinking and trivialization of otherwise critical issues of life and death have locked on the drone-delivered medical stuff project.
The subtle agenda is to give it a bad name and incite the good people of this country against it thereby stalling it.
Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia who has been at the forefront of the initiative, as he has other life-changing programmes in the country, continues to suffer NDC bad-mouthing for the feat.
The major hurdles towards the launching of critical medical supplies-bearing drones in the skies as they head for otherwise inaccessible and inclement terrains have been surmounted safe one: the negative ranting of the NDC.
In a social media post, one of their drone-averse activists asked whether motorbikes are no longer available to do such deliveries. He added ‘we should stop playing in this country.’ Playing? A government which is rehabilitating a railway system long gone moribund, having a record number of students in school through a free SHS module, brought back to life a near dead health insurance scheme and injected a lease of life into a collapsing banking system among others, is sure not playing.
Those playing are those being prankish with serious matters bordering on the health of the country. They are playing and exhibiting crass ignorance who think emergency blood supplies can be delivered to their destinations through sweating okada riders. Such display of ignorance about the fact of blood transfusion and delivery following strict international standards is the factor occasioning the cacophony and balderdash.
For those whose political enterprise when they were in government and even outside was fraught with fraud, the tendency to smell rat in any initiative not originating from them should not be surprising. That is why they are imagining that the NPP is doing what they would have done were they at the helm.
Government deserves plaudits for adhering to the laid-down best procurement practices in the matter of the drone project even before the unmanned craft are airborne. They could not have done otherwise with mischief being the lot of the opposition in the country.
We must salute also the majority side for allowing the minority to have their say so the matter can be subjected to further checks even as really there is no smoking gun. For an industry in which Zipline rules, hardly having a competitor and in the face of the criticalness of the subject, we do not know what alternative under the circumstances could have been better than sole-sourcing.
Saving lives through hi-tec innovation such as drones in a country which was denied good roads and an effective ambulance service during their tenure is of course a priority. To describe such efforts in reducing mortality rates occasioned by childbirth blood loss as misplaced priority is sheer wickedness, more so when this is originating from Hon Yieleh Chireh, one of the elders of the NDC who hails from the Upper West Region. Misplaced priority? Of course not. Fly, fly drone health emergency service!