Our Soldiers Must Conduct Themselves with Dignity and Professionalism at All Times!!!

A news item posted to the Ghanaweb.com edition of July 7, 2008, had some security guards at the 37 Military Hospital punitively assigning some traffic-breaching passenger-truck and bus drivers to work in the hospital's mortuary, cleaning and mopping floors as well as being forced to play lurid theatrical games with human corpses. No wonder this unpardonably primitive behavior, on the part of the soldiers, has provoked what aptly amounts to a national outcry or protest. For this writer, in particular, not only is such unorthodox punitive practice reprehensible and insufferably disgusting, it also readily recalls the “jungle days' of military dictatorship in Ghana.

Indeed, as I read the story, I wondered how these soldiers would feel and/or react, if Parliament decreed tomorrow that all the offending hospital guards were to be dispatched immediately to Iraq and Afghanistan as cannon fodder for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

We are told that the victimized civilian drivers and their mates – or conductors – were accused of traffic violation because they had cultivated the reckless habit of stopping too close to the main entrance of 37 (as the hospital is popularly known) in order to both unload and take on passengers. We are also told that there is a designated bus stop a little off the main hospital entrance, where civilian motorists could more safely and conveniently park in order to ease congestion as well as facilitate the movement of ambulances and other hospital-related vehicles in emergency situations. We are also told that drivers and conductors of passenger vehicles routinely complain that the officially designated vehicular parking spot appears to be too small for the level of commercial traffic in the vicinity. In other words, passenger trucks and buses appear to congest the main entrance into 37 because Ghana's Ministry of Road Transport, especially the latter's subsidiary Department of Motor Vehicles, has not done quite a good job of providing a more spacious, convenient and safe traffic stop for these vehicles.

If the foregoing observations are valid, then what both the 37 Military Hospital authorities and the Ghana Private Road-Transport Union (GPRTU) ought to be doing is to be calling the attention of Dr. Anane's ministry to the apparent fact of its flagrant dereliction of its duty. Instead, what we have here are two equally concerned but civically irresponsible groups attempting to take the law into their own hands. The preceding notwithstanding, we are also not in the least bit flabbergasted by the fact that there are apparently no signs specifically prohibiting motor-vehicle operators from illegally converting the entrance of 37 into a makeshift stop and a patent traffic hazard. For such dereliction of duty has been going on, literally, for ages now and there appears to be no clear indication that matters are wont to be brought under control anytime soon.

Needless to say, this is an embarrassingly striking example of cultural underdevelopment, as distinguished from technological underdevelopment. Still, what is spiritually cringing, to speak much less of the totally unacceptable, regards the nature of the punishment that the security guards at 37 decided to mete the offending motorists, that of washing up and mopping the floors of the hospital mortuary, as well as forcing traffic offenders to “romance” and play ungodly and unpardonably undignified theatrical games with human corpses. And exactly what the deceased did to merit such criminal violation of both their privacy and right to dignity has yet to be explained. And to be certain, it sadly reflects on the abject mentality of the average professional Ghanaian soldier and this is absolutely no good news at all. For what kind of human being harbors no respect for the dignity of the dead of his/her own kind, except a human animal? And by “human animal” implies one who looks physically like a human being, in both shape and form, but may actually have far more in common with the lower primates!

I am deeply invested in the foregoing observations, because this writer had his own late mother's remains briefly deposited at the 37 Military Hospital a little over a decade ago, and would have found it practically unfathomable to have had his birth mother's remains subjected to the kind of bestial indignity reportedly indulged by those guards at 37. And while, indeed, traditionally, soldiers are trained to shoot and kill – and then ask questions later – it is equally true that soldiers are also trained to respect and protect non-combatant human lives, as well as human corpses, even in highly tense combat zones. And the latter, of course, leads me to suspect that those guards involved in the incident at issue may well require thorough professional retraining, especially in the area of human sensitivity and common sense. Their victims also need fully-paid-for psychological counseling, fully-paid for by either the Military, the victimizers or the Government and other therapeutic medical services, for the kind of traumatic ordeal they endured is likely to create mental and psychological problems for most of the victims for the rest of their lives. The ideal case-scenario would be for the victims to sue the Ghana Armed Forces for compensatory damages. This is absolutely no joking matter.

On another level, the military guards who took the law into their own hands are unwittingly guilty of abject disrespect for the mortuary attendants, as they appear to be saying by their misdeed that the professionally significant and respectable job of a mortuary attendant is only worthy of a scofflaw and a brazen outlaw. Once again, this writer would like to take the prime, albeit unfortunate, opportunity offered by this national contretemps to encourage the Ministry of Information and National Orientation (MINO) to live up to its functional designation by sponsoring workshops in all our major national institutions, in order to inculcate the kind of civic and moral responsibility that Ghanaians require to forge a salutary and enviable democratic culture worthy of emulation across continental Africa.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008) and “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].