Communications Director of the party, Nana Akomea, in a statement, said the party was saddened that President Mahama, based on a 2007 video which featured former President Kufuor, would tell Chiefs in Suhum that the NPP presidential candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, is an intolerant person who would destool chiefs when voted as President.
“President Mahama should know that Chiefs in Ghana cannot be destooled by fiat of a president,” Nana Akomea held.
He continued, “What saddens the NPP even more is that while President Mahama has knowledge of a 2007 video, he is totally oblivious to the deprivation going on at the national psychiatric hospital, and the resultant strike by its staff and imminent closure of this major national health institution.”
According to Nana Akomea, it is very ironical for President Mahama to describe himself as a unifier, and tag others as divisive, when the NDC, a party he heads, recently dismissed 23 party stalwarts, including sitting Members of Parliament.
“It is so sad that while President Mahama talks fiction about others being intolerant, he is the only President in Africa who has told his people that they were not fit to criticize him until they have been President!” Nana Akomea said.
Nana Akomea maintained that President Mahama’s “ignorance of the happenings at the nation’s psychiatric hospital is just one more sign of a disastrous presidency, a President completely out of touch with the people who elected him into office.”
Based on this, Nana Akomea urged Ghanaians to show President Mahama and the NDC the exit in the December 7 polls and “bring this nation back to the path of true, visionary, decisive and accountable governance.”
Meanwhile, the striking nurses have disclosed that they run the mental home with their own savings.
In an interview with one of the aggrieved nurses Jamilatu Hussen on Peace FM, she noted that their strike action had nothing to do with unpaid salaries, but, rather, the poor prevailing conditions under which trained metal health nurses work.
According to her, nurses at the Accra Psychiatric hospital were inadequately supplied with drugs for mentally deranged patients, logistics and hospital consumables.
The poor condition, according to her, had made their job uncomfortable to an extent that they “often do not have gloves to wear to clean the excreta of the patients.”
“We are professional nurses with degrees and diplomas but we do not have basic items like gloves and bedspread to cater for the patients. Such impediment has put our lives at risk”.
As trained nurses expected to keep records of patents on daily basis, Jamilatu Hussen added, they are not even supplied with pens and notebooks to keep and write situational reports.
“We can write a request that we need 5 pens for the month but it comes as luck to be given just one. All they tell us is that they don’t have enough pens and incase one is fortunate to get two pens, then it means other wards wouldn’t get pens to write with”, she said.
Dealing with patients with psychological issues involve keeping the environment clean but from the accounts of Jamilatu, both nurses and patients at the Accra Psychiatric hospital live in an untidy environment where acquiring detergents to sanitize the place is hard to come by.
“Even plasters to dress sores with, we don’t have…We don’t have medicines for our patients and we need to sanitize our environment but we don’t have detergents”, she said.
The rot at the home has reached a level where nurses have to personally contribute monies in the form of “susu”, according to Jamilatu, before they can run the home and when “we told our head about the situation, she told us government doesn’t have money to cater for us.”