Kwaku Agyeman-Manu
The vetting of President Akufo-Addo’s ministerial nominees by the Appointments Committee of Parliament began yesterday at the Committee Room of at the State House, with a barrage of questions thrown at the Minister-designate for Health, Kwaku Agyemang-Manu, who took the first turn at the sitting.
The nominee answered, among others, questions on Covid-19, NHIS, health infrastructure, Central Medical Stores, fair distribution of medical officers across the country and his achievements in the last four years.
Please, I do!
His answers to some questions evoked spontaneous laughter when at a point he said “please I do, I do and I do” in an answer to a question on whether he believed in the number of Covid-19 infection being released out by the Ghana Health Service (GHS).
“Chair, we have battled Covid-19 for the past 10 or nearly 11 months. The strategies we have used, I will say, have worked more for us in Ghana. If you look at our deaths and infection rate – at a point we slowed down transmission to this level, we must be thankful and grateful to God and our President for leading the battle,” he stated.
Global Picture
According to him, a look at the globe indicates that Ghana is not doing anything different from the rest of the world, asserting that “the same protocol and things we are doing here are the same things everybody is doing. Fortunate for us we even seem to have known more than some even in America.”
“When Covid-19 started, what we started doing in Ghana – like contact tracing during the spread – some people in America did not even understand that. We are not going to change so much. The only new things we are going to do are the new things coming up in the globe – the vaccination. Apart from that we were beefing up our risk communication again,” he said, adding, “We have started trying to make sure that Ghanaians adhered to the protocols,” the minister-designate indicated and added that “that is the only solution.”
Mr. Agyemang-Manu said “Ghanaians are in the habit of blaming leadership – the minister and the President – for not doing enough.”
Latest Upsurge
He noted that “enforcement of the rules could be there, though voluntary compliance was lacking on the part of the citizenry, and this brought about the upsurge of the Covid-19 infection to its present level.”
“The latest upsurge that we got, you realize that when you begin to do contact tracing, a family went in there to celebrate 50 years anniversary; the man is dead, the father is on a sick bed, and the daughter (an elderly grown person) is severely ill. This is just because of a birthday party indoors,” he pointed out.
Mr. Agyemang-Manu said people had ignored the admonishment to continuously wear face mask, saying, “You can’t stay indoors continuously for two hours, because even there the face mask has become ineffective. All these are things we ignoring. People stopped wearing masks in taxis and trotro even when we eased up.”
“And what we know is that if you are open air in the sun, transferability is not too huge like sitting indoors and eating and drinking,” he said.
“These are challenges that we have and I believe now our communication should be encouraging people to adhere to the protocols as quickly as we can, and then keep distances, and see how we can avoid it,” he noted.
He disclosed that the government was trying to bring in vaccines for Ghanaians to be vaccinated, adding that the nature of Covid-19 was still not known to “great scientists on the globe. We still have to keep on wearing our mask.”
88 District Hospitals
On the issues of 88 district hospitals promised by the government last year, the minister-designate explained that the promise was President Akufo-Addo’s vision which was supposed to have been translated into action.
“The President set machinery in motion by setting up a committee at the presidency chaired by the Chief of Staff. I was a member and we pulled one or two infrastructure directors from my ministry, Ghana Health Service,” he disclosed.
He narrated that the committee had a fair representation, which asked the Health Ministry to write to the District Director for Health Services, while the then Local Government and Rural Development Minister was also to write to all district assemblies for them to allocate lands and provide site plans to the ministry for the projects.
“As I speak, we still have close to about 13 districts that have not completed this exercise. Some of the districts, after they got the initial responses, had a team that was set up and a coordinator had actually been appointed to coordinate this, because the work volume was so huge such that adding it on to our ministry’s work in the midst of Covid-19 would have meant that we would not move at all,” he further explained.
“They sent a team into various zones that had been divided by the coordinator and the team that was working on these 88 hospitals. Some of them have litigation matters and so we have to find a way to settle them. We are still working on these, and contracts have been awarded and they are waiting to do proper sod-cutting for the actual construction to start. The primary works have actually been done.
“We are not waiting for the ones that have not submitted and finished with the land issues, but we have started working on it. We face challenges. In the midst of Covid-19, things were not moving the way things had to go. That was why you might think we had not started serious work on any of them,” he said.
Ask My Wife
The minister-designate disputed claims that he was not fit to continue to hold on to his post after one of the committee member tried to use a purported audio recording against him.
He said he was misquoted and asked the members to find out from his wife if he was not fit enough to continue with his work.
“I have the privilege of having my wife here, so probably, she can assist me in answering that question. The translation of what I said here is wrong; 100% wrong. I made this admonition at a function in my constituency, Dormaa Ahenkro, and I spoke in Bono, so whoever did the translation got it entirely wrong and that is not what I meant.
“So, it is unfortunate that this has come back here but that is not what I meant. I was trying to tell people that they should have sympathy on those of us who are fighting the battle and listen to the admonitions we were putting into the public domain. I didn’t say it on radio and maybe let us correct that too. So, I think I have corrected the facts and I am not tired; you can ask my wife,” he said.
By Ernest Kofi Adu