The Health Facilities Regulatory Agency (HeFRA) has announced that it has launched an investigation into the practice of two healthcare facilities located in South Odorkor in Accra.
HeFRA’s action follows The Fourth Estate’s investigations which discovered that Francisca Quaye, alias ‘Matron Gaga’, an unlicensed midwife’s over 30 years of malpractice has resulted in numerous medical accidents, including the death of at least two babies under disturbing circumstances at the facilities within 11 months.
The Registrar of HeFRA, Dr. Philip Banor, says the agency on Tuesday dispatched a team to the New Generation Medical Centre where Ms. Quaye worked for almost three decades, and the Adam Family Specialist Clinic, where she found a new job after she was sacked from the former.
“This is pretty bad, and it is unfortunate that it went on without someone noticing and stopping it earlier than that. But once we’re involved, we’ll make the necessary referrals and we’ll discipline both the ownership and management of the facilities,” he told Joy FM on Tuesday.
Possible sanctions
Quack midwife, Francisca Quaye, and CEO of New Generation Medical Centre, Dr. Ralph Owusu Obeng Snr.
Dr. Banor says should investigations establish culpability, the management and owners of the institution will be sanctioned. The sanctions include the revocation of a facility’s license, and referral of the medical professionals involved to the professional bodies, including the Medical and Dental Council for sanctions.
Where the findings border on criminality, he says the agency would recommend that Attorney-General prosecute the offenders.
In the case of Francisca Quaye, who is not a midwife and is currently on the run, he says her case would be referred to the police.
It is an offence under Section 23 of the HeFRA Act (Act 829) to provide the regulatory institution with false information concerning the premises or to fail to submit the health data required to the Ministry of Health.
Section 15b of the law allows HeFRA to deny the renewal of a health facility’s license if it has “reasonable grounds to believe that the continued operation of the practice by the licensee will create a risk to public health, public safety or is indecent.”
Dr. Banor says the agency faces many constraints which prevent it from executing its mandate, including manpower.
Although the country has more than 15,000 healthcare facilities, the agency has only 125 personnel performing HeFRA’s monitoring functions.
Hiding the unqualified
With HeFRA required to announce schedules for its visits to health facilities before actually arriving for inspections, he says the agency is at a disadvantage when it comes to detecting fake healthcare personnel on the payroll of some of the facilities because the managements tend to devise ingenious ways of hiding them.
“The question is after you leave, who do they bring in? There are some people who don’t provide the list because they know there are issues and then the law says you must have a minimum number of [healthcare professionals]. There might be eight people working there, they give you six people as qualified. But then they go and hire other people.”
When The Fourth Estate wrote to HeFRA in 2022, it indicated that Francisca Quaye was not on the roll of workers the two institutions submitted to it.
“Unless you get a report like [The Fourth Estate’s] or someone reports them, then you make unannounced visits and enter the premises and so on [to investigate],” he explains.
Asked if HeFRA needs to announce its facility visits knowing that some of the facilities have been hiring unqualified persons, he says that can only happen after the agency receives a tip-off.
“The two institutions are registered but that woman was not registered. That is the funny thing they did. They know there might be an issue.”
Monitoring fees
Currently, the facilities are obligated to pay a monitoring fee to HeFRA before officials from the agency can visit and perform their functions intended to safeguard public health.
Dr. Banor acknowledges that the current arrangement poses challenges for HEFRA in fulfilling its role because when facilities fail to pay their monitoring fee, HEFRA is unable to conduct visits.
“Unfortunately, they have to pay for us to come. They have to pay monitoring fees and we use their fees to do the monitoring,” he says.
To authenticate the credibility of healthcare facilities, he advises patients to look out for the HeFRA license displayed at the facility.
Ironically, the New Generation Medical Centre and Adams Family Specialist Clinic had their licenses displayed but still employed Francisca, who is unqualified to practice midwifery in their facilities.
The Fourth Estate’s visit
Adams Family Specialist Clinic.
Meanwhile, When The Fourth Estate visited the two institutions on Tuesday, the New Generation Medical Centre was the busier of the two. At least two pregnant women at the facility were receiving healthcare.
There was, however, only one patient at the Adams Family Specialist Clinic.
After 18 months of investigations at a private health facility in Accra, The Fourth Estate has uncovered a frightening case of ‘Matron Gaga’, an unlicensed midwife whose over 30 years track of malpractice has resulted in numerous medical mishaps, including the death of at least two newborn babies within 11 months.
The story reveals how the New Generation Medical Centre provided the Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate with false statistics about its operations.
Here is the full investigative documentary The Quack Midwife – by Seth J. Bokpe and Evans Aziamor-Mensah of The Fourth Estate.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story shall not be republished or broadcast, in part or in full, in any shape or form without the express permission of the Editor-in-Chief.
Health sector regulations are designed to curtail quacks like Francisca Quaye, who practised midwifery for more than three decades without any form of training. Should the laws work as expected, the system should have stopped her from entering the health sector or fished her out within a short time.
Had the licensing and inspection regimes of the Health Facilities Regulatory Authority (HeFRA) and the monitoring of the Nursing and Midwifery Council been effective, Francisca would probably have been an administrative staff or an orderly, at best.
For decades, she thrived as a midwife on the laxity of enforcement of laws and rose to become the matron of a private hospital that delivered at least 20 babies monthly.
The system did not just fail. It failed pregnant women who went through Francisca’s hands, hoping to receive competent care, from a licensed facility and practitioners.
Some lost their babies. Others had their babies maimed. Some suffered a postpartum haemorrhage while others had their reproductive organs stitched terribly—sutured—as the medical professional would put it.
There was no such thing as being trained on the job to qualify as a midwife in Ghana.
On top of that, they paid illegal fees, fees already covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), directly into Francisca’s pocket.
What the laws say
Although the law did not permit her to be a midwife, she told The Fourth Estate that she had 34 years of experience.
Per Section 58 (3) of the Health Professions Regulatory Bodies Act (Part 3):
“(1) A person does not qualify to practice as a nurse, midwife or nurse assistant unless that person (a) holds a certificate from an institution recognised by the Council, and (b) passes a licentiate or professional examination conducted by the Council.”
However, the board has the discretion to grant exemptions to persons deemed fit.
Quack midwife, Francisca Quaye, whose 30-year practise resulted in the death of babies at the New Generation Medical Centre.
Francisca Quaye didn’t attend any accredited training institution or passed any examinations. Neither has she been given the green light by the Board of the N&MC as she confessed to The Fourth Estate.
The Fourth Estate wrote to the N&MC on August 12, 2021, requesting the status of Francisca Quaye as a midwife.
In a verbal response, the nursing and midwifery regulatory body said it needed more information to be able to dig through its database.
But unofficial search in the N&MC database indicated that no such midwife existed.
Registrar of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, Felix Nyante says “If you don’t sit and pass the licence and exams, if you are not registered by the council, you cannot say I am a registered midwife.”
However, in an interview on February 22, 2022, the registrar of the N&MC, Felix Nyante, said there was no such thing as being trained on the job to qualify as a midwife in Ghana.
“You see, whatever we do, we are guided by this Act,” Mr. Nyante said, raising a booklet of the law that empowers the council.
“If somebody says, ‘I’m trained on the job’, you don’t pass through our regulatory mechanisms. You cannot put your hands on your chest to say, ‘I´m a midwife’. And when we don’t also pronounce on you that you are a midwife by virtue of the fact that, one, you meet the entry requirements…,” he said.
He continued, “So, you are put in a classroom to be trained. You are sent to the hospital to also gain some clinical skills. A nurse’s supervision, preceptorship, mentorship and all those things [are necessary]. If you don’t sit and pass the licence and exams, if you are not registered by the council, you cannot say, ‘I am a registered midwife.’”
‘There is nothing like learning on the job for the unqualified’
While Francisca did not have any training, she learned on the job, courtesy of Dr. Owusu of the New Generation Medical Centre, where Francisca was employed for 28 years, and Dr. Essuman of the Adam Family Specialist Clinic, where she got a new job two months after she was sacked by the former.
Dr. Nana Oduro Essuman employed Francisca Quaye as Midwife Assistant but the Nursing and Midwifery Council says there is no such designation in the nursing practise in Ghana.
Asked if the midwifery system in Ghana recognised any designation as ‘midwife assistant’ as Dr. Essuman suggested, Mr. Nyante said, “No.”
The President of the Midwives Association of Ghana, Mary Ofosu, agreed with Mr. Nyante but was quick to add that some private health facilities had such personnel.
Mr. Nyante pulled out a list of people who impersonated nurse assistants and nurses but were arrested in public health facilities across the country and added that the N&MC published the faces of such people in national newspapers.
The conversation delved into an inter-institutional collaboration between the N&MC and the Health Facilities Regulatory Authority (HeFRA), which is in charge of licensing health facilities.
“Do you work with HeFRA?” The Fourth Estate asked him.
“…Yes, sometimes when HeFRA has or encounters any challenge, they verify from us whether this practitioner is in good standing or not in good standing. Certain times,” he said.
“Apart from them getting in touch with you, do you work together? For instance, you’re licensing the practitioner and they are licensing the facility. They do a lot of inspections.
“We also do a lot of inspections.”
“You do inspections?”
“We don’t call it an inspection. We call it to support supervision and accreditation.”
He said the N&MC monitoring teams visit both public and private health facilities to observe best practices, according to its procedure manual.
This document can be likened to a nurses’ and midwives’ bible.
During these visits, the practitioners are also given the opportunity to clarify nagging issues concerning their work.
But the response didn’t sound like private facilities were part of the monitoring.
The Fourth Estate probed further: “Does this system track private hospitals as well?”
“The regulation is not only for public facilities. Yes, it tracks private.”
“And also tracks the qualifications of those practicing there?”
“Yes. You see, before you even set out to do anything, you would have written to the facility. Usually, it is only fair to inform the facility ahead of time. And then you even request the list of the staff in that facility and you give them a template, so they’re able to tell you the registration number, validity of the license of the person. And then you even compare it in your database here before you set out. So, you have some fair idea of the standings of the staff before you set out.”
“Using this system, is it possible for you to lose within the mill, someone who is a quack for instance, and has been in the system for 30 years. Is it possible?”
“I wouldn’t say no. It might be possible. It might be possible. But once our radar falls on you, we’ll bring you to book.”
Asked how it was possible that for [almost]30 years, a quack midwife avoided their net, he said it was possible because humans by nature didn’t like regulation.
“So, can we say with certainty that every single healthcare facility in Accra for instance, is checked by you, in search of qualified midwives, qualified nurses?”
“It´s not that easy. Per the law, we are supposed to. But it’s not that easy.”
“Why is it not easy?”
“You have just limited it to Accra. But essentially, it’s not only Accra, it is the whole country…
“So, we sample. Those we sampled last year, of course, this year we wouldn’t go there. But we have a robust database of all the institutions that come under our regulation. That’s why I said if any institution exists without our knowledge, then this institution is not under our regulation, and we cannot say that we are regulating that institution.”
Offences
Over the years, the spotlights have been on quacks caught in the act in health facilities but the owners of those hospitals and clinics go scot-free.
But Section 73 of the Health Professions Regulatory Bodies Act, 2013 (Part 3), makes it an offence to engage unqualified persons to practice.
For the quacks, it is an offence to practice in a licensed facility, or provide unauthorised service in a licensed facility.
“Although both facilities are licensed, Examination of the files of the two facilities did not indicate the inclusion of the mentioned Francisca Quaye in the staff nominal roles of either facility during the registration, inspection, post-inspection, and by extension, the entire licensing process.”
According to the law, a person found guilty of any of these offences “is liable on summary conviction to a fine of not less than 500 penalty units and not more than 5,000 penalty units or to a term of imprisonment of not more than ten years or to both.”
To be eligible for a license, HeFRA requires “copies of certificates of proposed practitioners in the practice and proof of their up-to-date registration with their professional bodies.” This is on HeFRA’s website.
As part of promoting a standard of care, HeFRA does annual inspections of both facilities and personnel.
Registrar of the Health Facilities Regulatory Authority (HeFRA), Dr.Philip A.Bannor says both the New Generation Medical Centre and Adams Specialist Clinic do not have Francisca Quaye’s name in their nominal role.
In a letter dated February 16, 2022, and addressed to the Registrar of HeFRA, The Fourth Estate enquired about the status of Francisca Quaye and her working relationship with the two facilities.
The Fourth Estate sought to know if Francica’s name ever came up during the assessment of the two facilities for licensing.
In a response dated February 17, 2022, and signed by its head, Dr. Philip A. Bannor, HeFRA said:
“Although both facilities are licensed, Examination of the files of the two facilities did not indicate the inclusion of the mentioned Francisca Quaye in the staff nominal roles of either facility during the registration, inspection, post-inspection, and by extension, the entire licensing process.”
Interestingly, Dr. Ralph Obeng Owusu told The Fourth Estate that his clinic’s license had been renewed. Dr. Nana Oduro Essuman of the Adams Family Clinic also said HeFRA had been on an inspection tour of the facility in January 2022.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council’s registrar, Felix Nyante, told The Fourth Estate that health facility managers who conceal the information on unlicensed practitioners would not be spared by the law.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story shall not be republished or broadcast, in part or in full, in any shape or form without the express permission of the Editor-in-Chief.
In parts one and two of this story, we chronicled how The Fourth Estate uncovered an unlicensed midwife whose 30-year history of practice has resulted in the death of at least two babies within a year and the laissez-faire attitude of the owners of the facilities she worked. Today’s story reveals how the New Generation medical centre provided the Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate with false statistics about its operations.
In February 2022, The Fourth Estate wrote to the Ablekuma North Municipal Health Directorate requesting data on maternal and infant mortality at the New Generation Medical Centre, Sakaman, from 2019 to 2021.
The Municipal Health Directorate supervises all the health facilities under its jurisdiction.
This was to establish the number of mothers and children who had died at the facility within the period.
The response arrived nine months later— October 2022— although it was dated March 29, 2022.
“Per the Ghana Health Service (GHS) Code of Ethics and per the Standard Operating Procedures of Health Information for GHS external person seeking certain information pertaining to the service, kindly refer your letter to the Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate,” the letter signed by Dr. Yaa Dankwa said.
As it so happens, The Fourth Estate had already written to Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate in March 2022, asking for the clinic’s five-year child and maternal mortality statistics.
Their response came on April 11, 2022. Astonishingly, the New Generation Medical Centre says it did not record a single death, be it a child or mother, in the five years under review.
The Fourth Estate, however, established that within a span of 11 months, at least two babies died at the hospital.
A baby born to Kate Tetteh (not her real name) died on June 25, 2020. Another infant, Selasie’s baby, died on May 21, 2021.
Ideally, the New Generation Medical Centre is expected to submit monthly reports to its supervisory facility, the Ablekuma North Municipal Health Directorate.
Maternal and Infant Mortality Rate at the New Generation Medical Centre between 2016-2021.
Source: Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate.
Although the reports were submitted to the regional health directorate for the past five years, it appears the figures were ‘cooked up’ and did not capture the death of at least two babies in 2020 and 2021 as The Fourth Estate established.
The quack-midwife-turned-matron, Francisca Quaye, confessed that she sometimes delegated the writing and submission of these reports to her subordinates.
Her boss, Dr. Ralph Obeng Owusu Snr, the Chief Executive Officer of the New Generation Medical Centre, told The FourthEstate that he did not pay attention to such records.
Background
When Kate Tetteh’s (not her real name) baby died at the New Generation Medical Hospital in June 2020, the midwife in charge, Francisca Quaye, and the facility did not communicate the whereabouts of the baby to her until three days later.
Francisca convinced her that the baby was sent to the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital because she wasn’t breathing well.
The story changed from the baby’s breathing difficulties to a brain tumour.
It took Kate’s mother to break the news to her. Kate said she was broken and vowed never to give childbirth another attempt.
Francisca corroborated Kate’s account, insisting that it was an attempt to help the first-time mother who had lost the child under her supervision.
The baby died a stillbirth, the clinic’s records show. This was not captured in the Ablekuma North Municipal Health Directorate’s records.
That was not the only death recorded in the New Generation Medical Center.
Selasie Awaworyie’s baby weighing 4 kg died on May 21, 2021, at 7.45 pm.
The baby got stuck in the birth canal for about 20-30 minutes.
The weight of the baby should have alarmed the clinic to refer her, Dr. Owusu would later admit to The Fourth Estate.
Repercussions
The facility’s failure to provide accurate data to the Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate undermines Ghana’s drive to meet the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 3. This goal places priority on high-quality, evidence-based obstetric and neonatal care as a way to reduce maternal and infant mortalities.
This failure, according to the Health Institutions and Facilities Act,2011 (Act 829) is an offence punishable by law.
Section 23 of the Health Institutions and Facilities Act, 2011 says anyone who commits an offence by providing unauthorised services in a licensed facility and provides the Board with false information concerning the premises or practice “is liable on summary conviction to a fine of not more than five thousand penalty units or to not more than ten years term of imprisonment or both and in the case of a continuing offence, to a further fine of ten penalty units for each day.”
Part four of this story will be published on Friday, May 26, 2023.
In all these, what roles could regulatory bodies, including the Nurses and Midwifery Council (N&MC) and the Health Facilities Regulatory Authority (HeFRA) have played in keeping the likes of Francisca Quaye out of health facilities? How they respond to The Fourth Estate’s enquiries will be detailed in our report.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story shall not be republished or broadcast, in part or in full, in any shape or form without the express permission of the Editor-in-Chief.
In part one of this story, we chronicled how The Fourth Estate uncovered a frightening case of ‘Matron Gaga’, an unlicensed midwife whose 30-year history of practice has resulted in the death of at least two babies within a year, and the maiming of another. Today’s focus is on the owners/supervisors of two places Francisca Quaye worked during the course of our investigations.
June 27, 2021: It was a Sunday. The clock read 2.15 pm.
Dr. Ralph Obeng Owusu, the Medical Director of the New Generation Medical Centre, paced the compound of the one-storey building housing his clinic and home. For years, the downstairs had been the clinic, and the top, his home.
The grey-haired bespectacled family health doctor appeared rattled and angry.
The Fourth Estate’s eyes and ears at the clinic reported that the veteran doctor had been moody all day.
It was unusual. Although reserved, he is hardly sulky around his staff.
For decades, Dr. Owusu had anticipated a quiet retirement—handing over his clinic to his two sons—both medical doctors. But now, all he felt was dread and a vague, formless panic.
After today, a lot in his well-ordered practice, at least, that was what he thought, would change. He is not the type who liked the strident, jagged edges of change. His preference is for his affairs to run smoothly, down the middle of the road.
But one person was about to alter it.
“Was matron at work on Friday?” He asked no one in particular, as he walked to the reception area of the clinic.
The nurses at the front desk responded “Yes” in a chorus.
“Why doesn’t she listen when I talk to her?”
The question was not one that demanded an answer.
So, they went mute.
“Who was with her during the last delivery?”
Again, silence.
He walked away. His pace was faster than usual. His arms across his chest, folded when he entered his office, which shares a wall with the reception-cum triage.
The last delivery in question was the near-death experience of Esther Baker. Esther nearly bled to death after she popped a 3.5-kg baby.
By matron, he was referring to his assistant of almost 30 years. A boisterous character who has no midwifery qualifications but had done all midwives do—attend to pregnant women, deliver babies, cut and stitch the cervix of women in labour when their babies were too big to come out of the opening.
For the first time, Dr. Owusu thought of terminating the appointment of the matron, Francisca Quaye.
There was no appointment letter when he hired her verbally almost 30 years ago.
She’ll lose her job without a dismissal letter.
When he entered his office, he took the most difficult decisions he had been contemplating for days. He had to end it.
He made a call.
When he said “hello” to the person on the other side of the line, the entire front desk went shush.
The call was to Francisca Quaye. With pleasantries out of the way, Dr Owusu, with a little hesitation told Francisca not to report to work until he called her.
But it appeared his sidekick for almost 30 years did not get the memo.
When Dr. Owusu graduated from medical school in 1980 and completed his housemanship a year later, he didn’t see himself surviving in an economy that imposed hardship on everyone, even doctors. Rawlings had just overthrown President Dr. Hilla Limann. The economy was in shambles.
Dr. Owusu fled with his stethoscope, joining the brain drain. There were no guns to his head. Hunger had a gun on his stomach.
It was a time Nigeria was fulfilling the dreams of the economically disadvantaged from Ghana and other parts of Africa. It was enough reason to look elsewhere. The lure of oil money won.
He laboured in Nigeria for seven years. Six of those at the Health Centre of the Obafemi Awolowo University in the ancient city of Ille-Ife in Nigeria’s Southwestern state of Osun. The last year of his stay in Africa’s biggest oil producer was in Lagos.
By 1988, Ghana’s economy was beginning to see some revival. So, the 27-year-old doctor who had left for greener pastures returned a 34-year-old man with a renewed sense of patriotism.
He worked briefly for Cocoa Clinic before joining the Susan Clinic as its head. For five years, he worked with Francisca Quaye at the Susan Clinic. He admired her work.
Dr Ralph Owusu Obeng Snr sacked quack midwife, Francisca Quaye, in September 2021 after 28 years.
By 1993, he decided to answer to himself, not another boss.
So, they (Dr. Owusu and Francisca) left to start the New Generation Medical Centre in one of the quietest neigbourhooods in Accra—the South Odorkor Estate.
That relationship carried them through 28 years until that phone call on June 27, 2021.
The day she was asked not to report for work, Francisca arrived before 9 am.
The 67-year-old doctor was flustered. He ordered the clinic’s cleaner to call his beleaguered matron to his office.
The conversation went from murmuring to a shouting match.
“You always cause problems. When we talk, you don’t listen, if it’s not a mother, it’s a baby. I said go home until I call you.”
“Is it a suspension or what?” she asked at the top of her voice.
“Three months, just go home, until I call you,” he replied.
She walked out angrily but kept in touch with some of the staff for a daily run down.
In October 2021, Francisca called to announce that she was reporting to work because her three-month suspension had ended. She indeed returned to work, but Dr Owusu sent her home again.
A day after she was asked to go home, she came to the hospital in the company of her brother and an unidentified man.
Their mission was to beg Dr. Owusu to accept her back.
If she was hoping the two men would make her case, they failed. The soft-spoken doctor didn’t budge. The Rubicon has been crossed.
He insisted he didn’t ask her to return in three months when he sent her home in June but rather when he needed her.
Determined to shoo her out, he handed her an envelope—compensation. That in addition to a three-month salary from June was meant to end it all.
Francisca threw it back at him, storming out of the office. She entered the nurses’ lounge, packed her belongings, threw them into a waiting taxi, and left.
It would be her last day in the clinic she saw the sunset, almost every day for almost 30 years.
But it wouldn’t be her last day watching women navigate the pangs of labour.
I’m sorry—Francisca Quaye
Two months!
That is how long it took for Francisca Quaye to get a new job.
Her experience in the labour ward counted. Due diligence into her past didn’t count, The Fourth Estate would later learn from her new boss.
The Adams Specialist Clinic employed Francisca Quaye as a midwife assistant two months after the New Generation Medical Centre sacked her.
On February 2, 2022, Francisca received two unexpected guests at her new workplace, Adam Specialists Clinic, where that day, health workers outnumbered patients.
Her guests—two members of The Fourth Estate team—had been at the facility at least six times. Two of those days were with an undercover agent, whose story of miscarriage Francisca had ears for and even offered to buy medication for her.
“I told her she took care of me at New Generation, and that I had a miscarriage with a recent pregnancy. She consoled me and advised me to take folic acid. She offered to buy me medication for conception which I would pay for when I return to see her.
“She asked that I come back when I menstruate,” the undercover agent reported her encounter with Francisca.
On the day she met The Fourth Estate team, she was on a bench outside a newly constructed building that towers over the clinic’s administrative block and consulting room. Her palms were cusped on her lap.
For a uniform, she wore a cream scrub dotted with maps, dogs, and flowers on the top and spotless pair of purple trousers. On her feet was a pair of black sandals. Her hair was neatly tied into a blend of ash and a sky-blue shower cap. For facial expression, she wore a smile. A face mask would have hidden the fast transition from cheerfulness to sad-puppy face when the team broached her work at the New Generation Medical Centre.
“Let’s talk in private,” a team member of The Fourth Estate suggested. It was an attempt to escape the glare and ears of an old man who shared the bench with her and a carpenter nailing a board very close.
But there is no privacy in the narrow compound, where even whispers could be heard.
She opened the glass doors into a narrow corridor that led into wards. A patient was lying in one of the rooms.
With the formalities out of the way, she nodded to the idea that it wouldn’t have been fair to go to town without her side of the story.
“Are you a qualified midwife?” we asked her.
“No,” she responded without hesitation.
“But how long have you been practicing?”
“For 34 years.”
She then went on to give a history of how she became a midwife.
“My grandmother was a midwife at the Dora Quaye Maternity Home. When I was schooling, I had an interest [in it]. When I graduated from Form Four, I worked there as a receptionist. While working, I got more interested. When they’re working, I’d be in the room.”
When the team asked her permission to allow filming.
She ducked behind ill health.
“I have gone through hell. Because of this, I have been through a lot. I see myself like your daughter, that is why I want to talk to you,” she said.
“Do you remember Kate—?”
“The names are a lot. This issue is making me sleepless. My blood pressure is up,” she said in an attempt to kill the conversation.
It made no impact.
A nurse carrying a syringe and medications walked in. Francisca went hush.
She pleaded the conversation should continue outside.
That outside is a dingy space behind the new building. Debris and mortar from the construction work were splashed everywhere. Refuse bins lined up neatly. The clinic’s cranky water pump occasionally burst to life, disturbing the tranquility of the backyard.
The questioning continued.
“Why did you continue to work as a trained midwife even though you know you are not a trained midwife?”
“Mostly I direct them (other midwives) to work on the cases.”
“Why do you supervise trained midwives even though you are not trained?”
She stared at the floor and said nothing.
Turning to Kate’s case, she admitted that Kate’s baby died.
But she couldn’t tell her because Kate’s parents and fiancé’ advised that it could take a mental toll on the 27-year-old.
“The father, the mother, and the husband all said we should not tell her. They all said that she can go off if she’s told immediately.”
She said that informed the cooked story about the baby being sent to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital.
But there were contradictions in her story.
While she claimed it was Dr. Owusu who delivered the baby, both Kate and Dr. Owusu said the doctor wasn’t present until the baby was born.
When the conversation turned to Zekiya’s baby, whose shoulder joint got dislocated and her elbow twisted backward, Francisca became elusive with her answers.
She claimed two of those cases happened in the hospital. And on both occasions, she was not involved. The closest she came to Zekiya’s was when she returned to work and the baby’s mother brought her for postnatal care.
“I came to work on Monday. The doctor said if the baby did not recover, then we could refer her to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital. But when the mother came back, I realised that she had applied herbal medicine and a bandage on the arm and I said. ‘Oh Maa, the doctor said if it’s up to 40 days and we haven’t seen any change, then we refer her to Korle-Bu, but what you have done now, even if we refer you to Korle-Bu, they may not be able to find where exactly the fault is.’”
However, both Zekiya and Dr. Owusu confirmed that Francisca only called in Dr. Owusu when she was struggling to deliver the 3.7-kg baby
In the case of Esther, who nearly bled to death, she absolved herself of any blame. But admitted inducing her with a birth inducement pill, Cytotec.
Medical professionals at the Ridge Hospital questioned certain medications Esther was given after delivery, but Francisca disagreed with them saying, “I didn’t give her any other drug which shouldn’t have been given.”
For Bernice, who had a pad left in her vagina and had to return for its removal and re-stitching, Francisca had an excuse— it was not deliberate.
“Sometimes when the patient continues to bleed even after suture[restitching], we have had to leave the pad in there and we make sure that we inform them of it. We do that and remind them to remove it when they visit the restroom. I am sure she did not hear us speak about it probably because of the pain she might have been going through when we told her,” she explained.
Some midwives who worked with her insisted she interfered and dictated what should be done, although some of her practices were alien to best midwifery practices.
Away from dead babies and maimed patients, she couldn’t justify what went into the extra fees, except to say she sold nightgowns and other items and some of the women came to the hospital without those items.
Under Ghana’s free maternal care policy, pregnant women are entitled to free registration with the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), free of cost health services and drugs up to the time of childbirth and 90 days after birth.
But this is often abused by some healthcare providers (both public and private) who demand out-of-pocket- payments from pregnant women during their most critical moments.
A study published in the Health Economics Review in 2017 revealed that 69.4 % of the sampled women in rural Northern Ghana who gave birth perceived that the NHIS did not cover all the expenses incurred during childbirth. According to the report, the women indicated that they had made out-of-pocket payments for drugs and other supplies during childbirth even though the costs were covered by the NHIS.
The women The Fourth Estate spoke to said they paid the hospitals GH₵100 prior to going into labour only to be confronted with extra bills between GH₵ 300 to GH₵ 700, for which receipts were not issued. These payments were allegedly engineered by Francisca Quaye despite the fact that they were covered under the NHIS.
The findings from the study and Francisca’s out-of-pocket-payment demands on women due for delivery undermines Ghana’s drive to meet the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 3. This goal places priority on high-quality, evidence-based obstetric and neonatal care as a way to reduce maternal and infant mortalities.
For each woman that paid extra fees, she developed selective amnesia.
“It’s been long so, I can’t remember,” she said when The Fourth Estate put the allegations of illegal fees and the detention of newly-delivered mothers who couldn’t afford to pay until their relatives came to bail them.
“I can only apologise to them. To all of them, I am sorry. They should forgive me. I am really sorry for whatever happened. They should forgive me.”
When we pressed further, she could only beg.
“Daddy[referring to one of The Fourth Estate reporters], please, I am pleading with you. What’s going on with me can even cause me to take some poison,” she said.
“Uncle[referring to one of The Fourth Estate reporters], please, forgive me. I am taking care of an abandoned child who was left by the roadside by her mother. Anytime I remember what I am going through, then I feel like committing suicide. Daddy, Uncle, please, take me as your mother and forgive me. Please,” she pleaded grabbing the arm of a member of the team when she saw a letter addressed to the Medical Director of the Adam Specialists Clinic.
When The Fourth Estate put the issues of medical errors to her, she apologised.
“I can only apologise to them. To all of them, I am sorry. They should forgive me. I am really sorry for whatever happened. They should forgive me,” she said in what could be her first apology to any of the victims of her unlicensed practice.
Although the head of the New Generation Medicial Centre said he had fired her, Francisca Quaye told The Fourth Estate she left of her own volition, especially because of the many allegations
“I lost interest in the job when these issues started coming in. This got me thinking for some days. I went on hunger strike for two days just to understand the issues I was alleged to have been involved in.”
I was naïve –Dr Owusu
The Fourth Estate team’s first meeting with Dr. Owusu was on October 27, 2021.
He was brutally honest about his work with Francisca, with whom he started the New Generation Medical Centre.
“Who is your matron?”
“At the moment, we don’t have a matron, we have three midwives who help in the deliveries.”
“Have you ever had a matron before?”
“Yes, we did, but she is no longer here. There were a few issues and I realised that probably she wasn’t qualified for the work she was doing so we asked her to stop coming.”
“But you employed her, knowing her qualifications?”
“This is a difficult thing for me. I have known her for quite a while. She was under my tutelage. But I realised that there were a few issues with the management of some of the patients. We’ve had some supervisorial sort of enquiries about some of the problems. After that, I realised that it will be in the best interest of everybody for her to do proper licensing. It will not be professionally good for her to be doing what she was doing.”
“She was the one supervising the delivery of babies?”
“There were midwives here. I always have midwives here. She was doing general administration because she was helping me with running the place and then of course she was also supervising the midwives. I was supervising it.”
“How does someone who has not trained as a midwife supervise midwives?”
“I have tried very much to be directly involved with whatever happens here. Most times when there are problems or complications, they call me and I try to see what I can do. If it is beyond what I can do, then we refer to a higher authority. I have been responsible for manning the place and making sure things go well.”
He denied ever promising to deliver Kate’s baby saying, “I don’t do the babies directly. Maybe it’s her interpretation of how things are done that when the time comes, I’ll deliver her.”
“I think I’m in trouble. Am I not in trouble? …And that is my life. That is my life, and if this thing gets out of hand, I’m gone. I’m gone. And if it happens, who knows, I may put a knife on my throat.”
But The Fourth Estate would return for the answers to the questions of what happened on another day.
On Bernice, who had her vagina allegedly restitched terribly and a pad left in her without her knowledge, Dr. Owusu expressed shock that Bernice had not been told that she needed to remove the pad.
“In a case like that, she is [supposed to be] told that we packed it just to prevent bleeding and once she is here, we supervise it. If she goes home, we tell her there is a pad there when you get home remove it.”
Bernice was never told. She had to live with a skunk-like scent and pains for a week.
“Was it not dangerous to keep her [Francisca Quaye] here to even deliver babies?” The Fourth Estate asked Dr. Owusu.
“I agree with you. It was probably a little bit of naivety on my part. That is the truth. We were not doing too badly. There was always a midwife with her. But the thing with her is she was a little boisterous when it comes things of that nature. Anytime there is a problem, I used to talk to her. It was supervision, I didn’t know there would be so many problems.”
“What we’ve gathered here is that she didn’t even give the midwives the chance to operate”
Probably feeling overwhelmed, he paused.
“Hmmmm!” He let out an exasperation, before launching into an explanation “I don’t know, but I cannot explain that. Partly, I’ll take the blame because she has been under my tutelage for quite a while. I always try to impress upon the midwives that ‘I’m around. If there is any problem call me.’”
On the two occasions that Dr. Owusu spoke with The Fourth Estate, he insisted that forced labour was not done only on women who had gone beyond their expected date of delivery or had a weak contraction.
In an ideal situation, pregnancy should last for 40 weeks. So, The Fourth Estate sought to know why there were repeated cases of inducing pregnant women, some of whom were asked to go home and come back without any special care as best practice requires.
Dr. Owusu said, “If you have to induce labour to the extent that labour has not started at all, that has to happen when the patient has crossed 40 weeks. Pregnancy for a baby is 40 weeks. Maximum 42 weeks, their period in the womb is finished and the placenta’s ability to maintain the health of the baby goes down. So, the baby has to come out. The induction is done on post-term [pregnancy]”.
The conversation revealed that Francisca allegedly abused labour inducement drugs.
“At what point will you insert a medication in a pregnant woman and ask her to go home and come back?”
“No no no. That one, I don’t think is something that is …”
“Francisca Quaye’s processes involved that. It became a norm for medications to be inserted into women to enhance delivery, as she puts it. Did the hospital sanction that?”
At this point, he stammers.
“No! No! I didn’t sanction that.”
Asked about inducing pregnant women during their first stage of labour, especially when they had not passed their expected date of delivery, he said it was wrong, a wrong that Francisca allegedly perpetuated on many women.
When The Fourth Estate met Dr. Owusu for the second time on February 11, 2022, he wanted to cut the conversation short as he accepted that Francisca was not qualified for the job.
But he maintained that at all times, there were midwives around.
However, his attention was drawn to an earlier promise he made to clarify some claims including those his former employee made about him.
He admitted that Esther Baker was induced with Cytotec, a medication for inducing labour, but could not tell if she needed it at the time she was given.
He said it was possible for the nurses that accompanied her after the referral not to know the details of the event that got Esther referred to the Ridge Hospital because “some of the people who accompanied her may not even be midwives. They could be nursing assistants.”
Asked if the protocols permitted nursing assistants to accompany a postpartum bleeding patient, he said, “It’s not a perfect scenario.”
“I think I’m in trouble. Am I not in trouble? …And that is my life. That is my life, and if this thing gets out of hand, I’m gone. I’m gone. And if it happens, who knows, I may put a knife on my throat.”
Kate’s Stillbirth: allegations and Responses
Kate complained that when her baby’s head emerged, the midwife left her to her fate because she was cooking.
Dr. Owusu was of the view that while he didn’t encourage interference in the labour process, the time between when the head popped out and delivery was crucial.
“Once the cervix is fully dilated to the time the baby finally comes out of the womb, there is a time limit. You’re looking at that particular time limit. It should not go beyond that time limit. Once it goes beyond that time, then you’re looking at possible complications that are not making the baby come out,” he said.
Again, he said once the baby’s head emerged, the right thing to do was to encourage the mother to push because the contractions help with the baby coming out and at the same time gently rotate the head for the anterior shoulder to come with it.
“It is not a difficult thing, of course, [but] you have to be experienced and you have to be trained,” he said.
But he was also quick to add that it would also depend on the weight of the baby and the size of the mother’s cervix.
He pointed out that episiotomy—the cut in the cervix to allow the baby to come out— would be needed if the baby is bigger than the cervix.
When The Fourth Estate asked if Francisca was qualified to use the knife to expand the cervix, he said, “Francisca was not qualified to deliver a baby. The only thing is that we’ve been together for quite a while and she has learned on the job under my tutelage.”
“She was doing quite okay. Even with the deliveries, it was not too long ago that she started because I wasn’t allowing her. We’ve always had midwives here. She is a little domineering. The midwives she was working with; she was pushing them around,” he said.
On Kate’s delivery, Dr. Owusu admitted that he wasn’t around, but he was called and informed that she delivered a stillbirth.
“Did the hospital officially communicate to her that her baby had died?
“That one, I’m not sure.”
“What is the protocol around that?”
“The protocol is that you have to tell the mother that the baby did not survive. But sometimes because of emotional things, if she wasn’t told I won’t be surprised. Because of the initial emotional attachment, you want things to calm down a bit before you break the news to her. After a while, if she hasn’t seen the baby or heard the baby cry and all that, they’re in a better position to appreciate what has happened.”
“Is it a normal practice to tell the mother of a [dead baby] that you sent the baby to a NICU in another hospital?
“No! No! If the baby has died, I wouldn’t think that is the right thing to do.”
“That is what was done here.”
“I don’t know about that, honestly.”
“In the case of Kate, do you think you followed the procedure from birth to announcing to the parents that your child is dead?
“I’m not sure, probably we did it. I just left things for the midwives. They carry on with … so I’m not really sure,” he said.
“But I talked with her husband. We had a long chat with the husband. He brought out certain issues. There was something about Francisca cooking and all that,” he said.
Seeking to deflect the allegation, he said it was possible she had not fully dilated at the time she claimed Francisca was cooking.
Dr. Owusu also said it was impossible for Kate to see the baby’s head while lying down and that it was also impossible for the nurses to be laughing while Kate was in pain.
“I’m not perfect. This facility is far from perfect but look at the psychology of somebody who has lost a baby. I don’t think you can believe everything she says. She is bitter. She has lost a baby…Before they are fully dilated, they’re not even on the chair in the theatre, they’re in the bed. Hardly would you find anybody delivering on the bed,” he explained.
“There is a possibility that during the course of her contraction and pain, some of the nurses may be giggling and doing their own thing. We’re human. It doesn’t mean nobody cared for her. I will not agree with that one. It’s just the circumstances [under which] she lost the baby.”
He also confirmed that he was angry when he saw the outcome of the re-stitching of Kate’s vagina done by Francisca.
“There’s a way we do the stitching. If you don’t do it well, it can give in. When I saw it, I said no, no, this is not the right thing. It wasn’t properly done. I had to put her on some medication so that the wound will heal much faster without much complication.”
Dr. Owusu was honest about his failure to tame his employee. But he has fears about the consequence.
“I think I’m in trouble. Am I not in trouble? …And that is my life. That is my life, and if this thing gets out of hand, I’m gone. I’m gone. And if it happens, who knows, I may put a knife on my throat”
Francisca Quaye’s next stop
Dr. Nana Essuman, Medical Director, Adams Family Clinic, who initially told The Fourth Estate that Francisca Quaye was employed as a midwife assistant later refused an interview with The Fourth Estate.
On February 1, 2022, The Fourth Estate wrote to the Medical Director of the Adam Family Specialist Clinic, Dr. Nana Oduro Essuman, requesting an interview.
By February 3, 2022, The Fourth Estate met the Medical Director of the clinic, Dr Nana Oduro Essuman.
He admitted that the clinic employed Francisca Quaye as a midwife assistant. He described her as highly experienced but was quick to add that she wasn’t employed as a midwife because she lacked the qualifications.
Section 58(4) of the Health Profession Regulatory Bodies Act, 2013 (Part 3), requires that even nursing assistants must be trained by accredited institutions and licensed by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (N&MC). Where there is an exemption, it has to be granted by the board of the N&MC.
Francisca didn’t have that exemption.
However, halfway through the conversation on February 3, 2022, Dr. Essuman requested that he should be allowed to consult shareholders and lawyers of the clinic.
“After that you can even bring your cameras for a full interview.”
However, On February 11, 2022, he reached out to The Fourth Estate with a letter dated February 9, 2022.
The letter said, “We wish to state that there has not been in the employ of our facility any midwife named Francisca Quaye. To this end, we are not in a position to grant you an interview as requested.
It went on: “We are by this bringing to your attention that our facility has no association with any midwife by name Francisca and should not in any way be associated with any publication concerning and or/involving the said Francisca Quaye.” Dr. Essuman, the man who had told The Fourth Estate team that the woman worked there, signed the letter.
Further, the clinic threatened legal action should The Fourth Estate fail to adhere to the caveat.
Interestingly, Dr. Essuman said he would only grant The Fourth Estate an interview if the media house had a court order.
The Fourth Estate wrote to the Greater Accra Regional Health Directorate in March 2022, asking for the clinic’s five-year child and maternal mortality statistics.
Its revelation was astonishing and will be in part three of this story to be published on Thursday, May 25, 2023.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story shall not be republished or broadcast, in part or in full, in any shape or form without the express permission of the Editor-in-Chief.
After 18 months of investigative reporting at a private health facility in Accra, The Fourth Estate’s Evans Aziamor-Mensah and Seth J. Bokpe have uncovered a frightening case of ‘Matron Gaga’, an unlicensed midwife whose 30-year track of malpractice has resulted in numerous medical accidents including the death of at least two newborn babies.
Inside the labour ward of New Generation Medical Centre, a private clinic in the South Odorkor Estates at Sakaman in Accra, Kate Tetteh (not her real name), a heavily pregnant beautician was writhing and groaning in pain from her first labour pangs. As her contractions peaked, her screaming grew louder.
But the nurses on duty found that funny: they laughed out loud.
“They were even teasing me,” Kate, 28, recalls in disgust.
All she wanted at that point was professional assistance, as one would expect from a health facility. What she got at New Generation was derision. Her request for her fiancé and her mother to be allowed in to soothe her was summarily dismissed.
The ordeal became even heavier than she anticipated.
The beautician says she felt like she was between life and death, alone. She says the professionals who should have been her helpers became her tormentors.
“When my baby’s head was visible, the midwife who was the one delivering me wasn’t around.”
Francisca Quaye alias Lady Gaga, the quack midwife, whose unprofessionalism led to the death of at least two infants and the maiming of others at the New Generation Medical Centre.
The ‘midwife’ in question is Francisca Quaye alias Matron Gaga. Matron Gaga had apparently taken some time off her busy cooking preoccupation to visit the nuisance of her patient who was admitted to the facility to deliver a baby. Kate says Matron Gaga walked into the labour ward to check on her holding a cooking utensil in one hand and vegetables in the other.
“When she returned, she was holding a knife and an onion or something; I don’t remember. I didn’t see her again for like five minutes.”
Kate’s ordeal and loss
Kate, who lives in Accra, says she first visited the New Generation Medical Centre on June 24, 2020. According to her antenatal records, she had a normal pregnancy, with her baby kicking from time to time as expected. According to her scan, she could deliver any day between June 19 and 30,2020.
And then a strange thing happened: even though Kate still had a week left within the expected delivery window, Matron Gaga, contrary to all established medical practice, decided to artificially induce labour by prescribing the oral medication Cytotec.
And then she asked the confused expectant mother to go back home.
Cytotec is used to induce labor in women. It works by softening the cervix to allow easier dilation and producing contractions. In most cases, Cytotec is a safe and reliable medication that can make labour easier for women in distress when administered correctly. The Reproductive Health Centre of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital however warned in 2011 that Cytotec abuse can cause infertility and even death.
Kate recalls the ordeal that ensued after the unnecessary artificial induction.
“I felt weak, [but Matron Gaga] asked me to go home, [and] roam until I felt pain, then I could come. I boarded a taxi and went home. But I couldn’t sleep. The pain was unbearable. I was feeling the pain and I called her and she said I should come when I felt more pain. I went through pain from 10 am to 6 pm”.
Kate says she cried until her neigbour convinced her to return to the clinic. Then her nightmares began.
“Initially, my baby was kicking. My baby was very strong. He used to kick me and I would even be crying. When [the midwives] started pressing my stomach, I didn’t feel him again. But it was my first time, so I thought it was normal,” she recalls.
Kate remembers Matron Gaga using “something sharp” to cut her “down there and “pulling” her baby boy out.
“When my baby came, I didn’t hear him cry. I expected the baby to cry because there were days I went to antenatal and would hear newborns cry. When I didn’t hear mine cry, I asked [Matron Gaga] why. She said the baby was tired and that he would eventually cry.”
Mother-child bonding is essential for normal infant development. New mothers will hold their babies next to their bodies, rock them gently, strive for eye contact, sing or talk to them and begin to nurse. Often within just hours of birth, mothers report feelings of overwhelming love and attachment for their new baby. As a convention, newborn babies are handed over to their mothers as their first opportunities for bonding. In Kate’s case, this did not happen.
“I forced [Matron Gaga] to put him on me. It didn’t even take a minute and they took him off me and placed him on a chair,” laments the horrified beautician.
The nightmare continued.
“I raised my head and saw one nurse cleaning my baby’s nose. There was blood from the nose. I asked the nurse what she was cleaning. They didn’t want me to know what was happening.”
Instead, Francisca Quaye and her team turned to congratulate her. They even poured powdered talc on her, a ritual to celebrate victory.
“Someone went to call the doctor. But I didn’t hear what they were saying because I was in pain. I saw his facial expression, and it wasn’t good. What I heard was [the doctor asking]: ‘Why didn’t you come and call me?’”
Matron Gaga then followed him outside. When they re-entered the labor ward, the doctor proceeded to “beat” the newborn baby.
“[He] was beating [my] baby. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought it was [normal] so I kept quiet for them to do their work,” Kate recalls.
Kate was then moved to a recovery ward where the horror continued.
Kate’s mother suddenly came in crying. When asked why she was crying, no answer came. The Fourth Estate can confirm that the clinic’s poorly kept records show, however, that Kate had a stillbirth.
She became suspicious when she saw her baby wrapped tightly, but Matron Gaga falsely assured her that her baby was being referred to the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital because “it wasn’t breathing well”.
That was Day One.
The next day, she was discharged.
“I was told I should go home for like three months before I could come for my baby,” Kate tells The Fourth Estate in disbelief.
When she insisted that she wanted to be with her “sick baby”, Matron Gaga assured her that she would be assisted to visit her child at Korle-Bu that night.
That night, the clueless mother held a vigil in pain and in anticipation. Needless to say, Matron Gaga’s call did not come. Instead, she lied to Kate that she tried to reach her during the night, but she was deep in sleep.
“She said she came and called, and I didn’t mind her, so she went with the doctor and my baby to Korle-Bu and [that] they put him in a machine.”
Soon, the reason for the baby’s referral changed from respiratory complications to the presence of a brain tumor. When she expressed confusion, Kate says Matron Gaga put her through to a “doctor” in Korle-Bu.
“She put the phone on loudspeaker and the person was talking. [The person asked]: ‘Are you Kate? Your baby has a brain tumor, and a lot of issues,” narrates Kate, who believes a New Generation Medical Centre staff member conspired with Matron Gaga for that call.
“They said my baby had a brain tumor so they would want to leave him in the machine so that he dies in the machine because if they brought my baby to me, it would become a burden on me,” Kate explains.
On day three, Kate’s worst fears were confirmed: her mother confessed to her that she lost her baby at birth.
Kate says almost two years after that fateful experience, New Generation Medical Centre is yet to officially communicate the death of her baby and its cause to her. Normally, each health centre in the district is required to submit monthly reports to its supervisory facility, the Ablekuma North Municipal Health Directorate. But these reports, The Fourth Estate has learned, are often “sanitised”, and do not reflect events at the private clinics.
The phony matron, Francisca Quaye, said she sometimes delegated the preparation of the report to her junior staff. The head of New Generation, Dr. Ralph Obeng Owusu, admitted to The Fourth Estate that he does not pay attention to such records.
According to Kate, “Even when I went for the dressing and asked [Matron Gaga] if my baby was dead, she asked me who told me my baby was dead, and that, I shouldn’t mind them.
“It was later that I whatsapped her that I knew my baby was dead and that she should forget it.”
“My baby would have brought me a lot of joy because my baby daddy said he would marry me after [I give] birth. Now, he couldn’t marry me. I don’t think I can give birth again. Maybe I’ll adopt or something like that.”
Stitching gone bad
Going through the ordeal and losing her son at birth was not the end of Kate’s suffering at the hands of the fraudulent midwife Francisca Quaye. The bereaved mother discovered that her perineum was very badly infected. The perineum, which is the area between the vagina and anus, is liable to tear during childbirth. After delivery, the doctor or midwife usually closes the perineal tear with stitches. The stitches usually dissolve in a week or two, so they will not need to be removed. In Kate’s case, the suturing was done so badly that the entire region was septic.
“[Matron Gaga] told me to sit on hot water after 10 days. I did, but the thread tore, and it became sore and became big like a gutter. I took a picture and sent it to Dr Ralph Owusu. He got pissed and asked who did that to me. I told him it was Francisca [Quaye]. He told me to come so they could stitch it again.”
When Kate arrived at the clinic, she met an angry Matron Gaga who demanded to know why she sent the picture to her boss when it was, she who did the stitching.
“She got pissed… said I wanted to get her sacked. She said the doctor insulted her that she didn’t [close the perineal tear] well. They had to re-stitch it,” remembers Kate.
For the next three months, Kate couldn’t walk.
“Since then, I deleted all their numbers. I don’t [want to] have anything to do with them,” she told The Fourth Estate in July 2021.
That series of painful episodes at the New Generation Medical Centre has destroyed many things in Kate’s life — her baby, her relationship, and the idea of ever-carrying a baby. The trauma has left a scar in her life.
“My baby would have brought me a lot of joy because my baby daddy said he would marry me after [I give] birth. Now, he couldn’t marry me. I don’t think I can give birth again. Maybe I’ll adopt or something like that.”
“A midwife cannot do induction on her own”
Unconventional midwifery
President of the Midwives Association of Ghana, Mary Ofosu says a midwife cannot do induction on her own.
When Kate’s induction ordeal was reported to the Midwives Association of Ghana, the President of the group, Mary Ofosu, described Francisca Quaye’s action as unconventional and inconsistent with midwifery practice.
“A midwife cannot do induction on her own,” she said of Matron Gaga’s Cytotec procedure. “There must be a medical officer or specialist around. You should also have a theatre around because induction can fail. So, when you induce and it fails, we need to take the client to the theatre. So, before you do induction, you need to get all those things around.”
She was not done yet.
“You can do induction of labour when the client is post-date. That’s when the doctor can prescribe induction of labour or when there is maybe some medical condition like pregnancy-induced hypertension,” the professional midwife with 16 years’ experience explained.
In addition, regarding the secrecy around Kate’s stillbirth, Mary Ofosu made it clear that a mother who loses her child at birth must be told before she leaves the health facility.
July 6, 2021: the case of Esther
On Tuesday, July 6, 2021, Esther Baker, 31, delivered her first baby. For a period of four hours, she suffered the most excruciating pain in her life. This was the longest four hours of her life.
She nearly bled to death. Medical practitioners call it post-partum haemorrhage, which research says accounts for 24% of all maternal deaths in Ghana. Experts say it happens within the first 24 hours after a baby is born. The most critical time for post-partum hemorrhage is the period from the birth of the infant until the placenta is delivered.
The night before she went into labour, Esther, a worker at a savings and loans company, said a part-time midwife who ran the night shift at the New Generation Medical Centre wondered why she had not been referred to a bigger hospital. She recalls:
“She said my age and [my] past record [with] miscarriage could cause some problems. She was like, immediately, they had to give me a transfer and that I shouldn’t deliver there.”
Given her history, Esther was very concerned, but she put her trust in prayer for divine intervention.
But that night, a midwife, whose name Esther remembers as Abigail, assured her that all was well. With that assurance, Esther prayed silently that Abigail would be the one to deliver her first bundle of joy, four years into her marriage.
Alas, this was not to be.
New Generation Medical Centre at South Odorkor, Dansoman,Accra, where Francisca Quaye worked as a midwife for nearly 30 years without a license.
The night passed at the New Generation Medical Centre without any incident. The clinic is popular for affordable care. The icing on the cake for its poorer patients is that it accepts National Health Insurance. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was one of the vaccination centres.
And then morning came. At the point when Esther was fully dilated, her body became the grounds for a turf war between midwife Abigail and the clinic’s matron, Francisca Quaye. Matron Gaga, disagreed with her staff’s professional assessment of the situation and proposed a rather bizarre remedial action. The two argued: in the end, Abigail had her say, and Matron Quaye her way.
“Abigail is a professional midwife,” observes Esther. “It’s like a ‘by force’ something that [Matron Gaga] was doing. She doesn’t take her time attending to the person in pain. Hers is to just rush you and that you shouldn’t be that soft.”
From janitor to midwife
The Fourth Estate’s investigations have revealed that Francisca Quaye has never been to any nursing or midwifery training school.
To be recognised as a midwife in Ghana, one has to complete an accredited nursing/midwifery training institution and pass a licensing exam conducted by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (N&MC) renewable annually. Any exemptions to this rule may only be granted by the board of the N&MC.
Francisca Quaye has neither a license nor an exemption.
Eventually, Francisca Quaye delivered babies, undertook incisions (episiotomy, which allowed the birth canal to open for childbirth), and stitched afterward. When the doctor got too busy with patients, she handled consultations for outpatient cases too.
In the last 18 months that The Fourth Estate has been digging into malpractice at New Generation Medical Centre, a long list of frightening medical accidents has been uncovered.
Our investigations found at least two deaths under disturbing circumstances while she was in charge. A new mother nearly bled to death. Two other new mothers needed urgently to have perineal tears re-stitched due to unprofessional sutures and infection and a newborn had her arm dislocated.
Francisca Quaye allegedly also charged National Health Insurance cardholders unapproved fees.
Who is Francisca Quaye alias Matron Gaga?
An ‘O’ level-holder from Ebenezer Secondary School, Matron Gaga claims she cut her teeth in midwifery under the tutelage of her mother at the Dora Quaye Maternity Home at Takoradi in the Western Region. After school in the 1980s, she got a job at the Susan Clinic, where she multitasked— mopping, manning the front desk, and filing forms.
This was where Francisca Quaye met Dr Ralph Obeng Owusu who had returned to Ghana in 1988 after a seven-year stint in Nigeria. For five years, Dr. Owusu ran the Susan Clinic, and when the time was ripe, he poached Francisca Quaye. The two started the New Generation Medical Centre in 1993.
Her multi-tasking became handy at the new facility. With time, she shifted from administrative work to helping as a medical hand—attending to pregnant women on antenatal visits and assisting during deliveries. Eventually, she delivered babies, undertook incisions (episiotomy, which allowed the birth canal to open for childbirth), and stitched afterward. When the doctor got too busy with patients, she handled consultations for outpatient cases too.
“There were times her procedures [were off], and you would prompt her, and she’d tell you that she knew better.”
For the past 30 years, therefore, she has been Dr. Owusu’s sidekick in all respects of the term.
Still, in her early 50s, not everyone views Francisca Quaye as a villain. Some past New Generation patients swear by her care and kindness. They say she lends her ear even to their domestic problems.
“When it comes to marriage, relationships, and life in general, she was very lively. When it comes to communication, she is nice,” a midwife who worked briefly at the New Generation Medical Centre in 2020 remembers.
“She has no limits to love. She pampered and even fed me before,” Kate recalled the days before Matron Gaga’s professional incompetence got in the way of their patient-nurse relationship.
On occasion, Francisca Quaye would offer freely unconventional remedies for medical problems. One former patient recalls her recommending residual water from a washed fufu mortar to treat sores.
Science and superstition mixed freely in her practice—one that has a lot of question marks, The Fourth Estate has learned.
Even many junior midwives doubted her competence.
“I didn’t really know if she was a professional midwife. I still can’t figure it out. There were times her procedures [were off], and you would prompt her, and she’d tell you that she knew better,” a midwife who wants to remain anonymous told The Fourth Estate.
“There was a time I received a baby [Matron Gaga had delivered]. There is this creamy thing on newborns. To keep them warm, you don’t have to clean all of them. She told me what I had learned in school was not what was [done] on the field…She undressed the baby and cleaned everything,” the midwife said.
The midwife is referring to the vernix on newborn babies. The World Health Organization also recommends not wiping off the vernix at birth. The main reasons to wait with your baby’s first bath include keeping them warm and stabilizing blood sugar levels. Babies who are bathed too soon after birth are more likely to become cold and could develop hypothermia.
The trained midwife said she left the facility because she was afraid of losing her license working in a facility where her boss opposed best practices.
What Francisca Quaye lacks in an imposing figure, she makes up for in assertiveness and aggression. Some of her former co-workers describe her as bossy, domineering, and sometimes, insensitive. She is not averse to verbally sparring in the presence of patients.
Some patients find her brutish. With a laissez-faire Dr. Ralph Owusu as her supervisor, her influence has grown to the extent that she can override the decisions of even qualified midwives, earning her the nickname ‘Matron Gaga’.
June 14, 2021: the case of Bernice
As was the case of Kate Tetteh, qualified midwives at New Generation Medical Centre identified that Bernice Owusu’s (not her real name) cervix needed a little expansion to make way for her baby to be delivered.
The 28-year-old delivered her first baby, safe and sound. Her birth experience with Matron Gaga was however far from smooth.
“When you’re in labour, you’d need someone who is patient with you. For me, I won’t lie, she wasn’t [patient] with me at all. She did everything as though she was in a hurry to attend to something else,” Bernice says, in reference to Francisca Quaye.
Pad left in the vagina
Before long, she felt something was not quite right with her—it was another case of botched stitching after crude episiotomy. The needle and sutures were worked by none other than Matron Gaga.
Bernice says despite the anaesthesia, she felt the pain while the needle went through her flesh.
“She injected the place, but I don’t know how she injected it. When she was stitching and I was screaming, she didn’t want me to scream. The pain was unbearable.”
Bernice took home medications and adhered to the dosages and instructions from Matron Gaga, but the pain in her perineum region was like a vortex. She was caught in a deep pain that gnawed at her sanity.
In about a week, her vagina area started smelling foul. Bernice says she has always prided herself on taking good care of her personal hygiene. Upon some scrutiny, however, she says she was mortified by what she saw.
“I noticed there was something left in my vagina. The Faytex pad they used in draining the blood. It was left there. I had not given birth before. No one told me that I had to take it out when I get home. The thing was there for about a week and started smelling.
“My mom had to check before she realised that the Faytex pad was there and … [the stitches were] torn and my cervix open.”
She quickly reached out to Abigail, the professional night-shift midwife, who advised her to rush to the clinic.
“When [Abigail] took out the thing, the whole room was smelling. She treated me very well and re-stitched the thing. I don’t know how she injected me but when she was sewing, I didn’t feel anything until she was done. I didn’t feel any pain like the first time and she did it very nicely,” Bernice says.
Bernice said she is psychologically scarred following what she went through at the hospital.
Unlike Kate, like Bernice, Esther Baker gave birth to a healthy baby. But it nearly cost her, her life.
The 35-year-old first-time mother switched from Barnor Hospital in Laterbiokoshie to New Generation Medical Centre about five kilometres North West. She was in her fifth month of pregnancy, but the switch was needed for financial reasons.
Each time she visited; she saw red flags. But when poverty conducts an orchestra, it is the poor who nod to the melodies, so she closed her eyes to the flaws.
On July 6, 2021, Esther delivered but there was trouble. Her baby weighed 3.7 kilogrammes.
Nearly fatal
At the Ridge Hospital [Greater Accra Regional Hospital], the New Generation nurses who accompanied Esther were unable to answer basic vital questions posed by their fellow nurses at the referral facility.
Despite the excruciating pain she suffered, Esther says the resident doctor, Dr. Ralph Owusu made light of her situation and left her to attend to “other” things.
“About five hours after delivery, I started bleeding profusely. I fell unconscious. I don’t know what went wrong.”
Dr. Ralph Obeng Owusu Snr, the Chief Executive Officer of the New Generation Medical Centre, panicked when he saw the unconscious Esther Baker and asked why he was not called earlier to attend to her.
According to her husband’s account, Matron Gaga panicked and called for Dr Owusu’s attention. He said she screamed Esther’s name a couple of times before giving the unconscious woman a bottle of malt in an attempt to revive her. A call to Korle-Bu for a possible referral did not yield any results. As luck would have it, Esther’s sister-in-law, who’s a nurse, intervened and got her transferred promptly to the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (also known as Ridge), even as efforts were being made to resuscitate her.
At Ridge Hospital, the New Generation nurses who accompanied Esther were unable to answer basic vital questions posed by their fellow nurses at the referral facility.
“No record was taken of me. Even the quantum of blood I had before delivery. They were just fumbling,” Esther recalls being told by the nurses when she gained consciousness at the Ridge Hospital. This raised curiosity among the Ridge Hospital professionals. Before they could make sense of the cause of the emergency, their counterparts from the New Generation Medical Centre had resorted to a solution to the embarrassment – they bolted.
Fortunately, Esther’s condition stabilised the following day. Apparently, the medical team detected and immediately discontinued a medication that was wrongly administered.
Again, prior to delivery, Esther recalls that the team at New Generation Medical Centre had administered Cytotec “when I went to antenatal in the morning and when I dilated, one [Cytotec] came out.” The doctors at Ridge “suspected that to be the cause of the excessive bleeding”.
More horrifying tales from New Generation Medical Centre exist.
May 7, 2021: the case of Selasie
Selasie Awaworyie went into labour at 7.45pm on May 21, 2021. But there was a complication: the baby which weighed 4kg got stuck in the birth canal for almost 30 minutes.
The 4kg weight should have alarmed the clinic to refer Selasie to a specialist facility, Dr. Ralph Owusu would later admit to The Fourth Estate.
…And then Zekiya
What happened to Kate, Esther, Bernice, and Selasie were more than isolated accidents by a midwife. Malpractice at New Generation Medical Centre is more the norm.
Zekiya Abubakari commuted 19 kilometres from Tuba, a dusty community near Kasoa in the Central Region, to the New Generation Medical Centre for antenatal care until she delivered.
Zekiya, whose baby, little Afua, suffered from Erb palsy at the New Generation Medical Centre due to Francisca Quaye’s unprofessionalism was asked to go home without any remedy when she complained.
Her first three children had everything intact at birth, but the fourth gave her heartache. Her experiences in delivering two children in a public hospital weren’t worth repeating so she opted for private healthcare for her third and fourth.
Within two hours of arriving at the New Generation Medical Centre, Zekiya gave birth. Matron Gaga was on duty. It was a few minutes after noon.
Baby’s arm broken at birth
“When I was delivering the child, I had difficulties and was told that the child had opened her arms while coming. It blocked her safe delivery. It took the intervention of the resident doctor to help deliver the child.”
When the baby’s father took her into his arms on the first day, she was screaming. The family took it for her reaction to a new environment.
But on day three, the baby’s aunt noticed that the baby’s right hand had gone limp. Her elbow had also twisted. When the sponge touches her right arm during bath time, the little girl screamed.
“I suspected that it was the process of delivery that got my child’s right hand dislocated.”
When Zekiya called Matron Gaga to report the state of her daughter’s health, her response was that there was nothing wrong and that her daughter’s arm was normal. She told the anxious mother that many children were born with such defects and that the mother should let the hand be. She said it would heal.
The bonesetter
The bone setter, Issah Tetteh, confirmed to The Fourth Estate that little Afua’s shoulder joint had dislodged, and her elbow twisted when she was brought.
But the little girl was restless. She couldn’t sleep. She was suffering what is known as Erb palsy, a condition characterized by arm weakness and loss of motion. It can occur in both infants and adults. Experts say it’s typically caused by a physical injury during delivery or by traumatic force downward on the upper arm and shoulder, damaging the network of nerves near the neck that provides movement and feeling to the shoulder, arm, hand, and fingers.
Furious, Zekiya contested Matron Gaga’s false assurance, saying that she was experienced enough to know that there was a problem.
For a second opinion and on the advice of elders in the family, the baby’s parents took her to a traditional bonesetter famous for resetting the bones of accident victims.
The bonesetter, Issah Tetteh, confirmed to The Fourth Estate that little Afua’s shoulder joint had dislodged, and her elbow twisted when she was brought to him.
He took to massaging her and bandaged the arm in a manner that breathed life into it.
“My child is getting better,” Zekiya says.
Mr Tetteh said it was likely there was still some pain left in the arm and it needed some extra work.
While the investigation was ongoing, Dr. Owusu sacked his sidekick “midwife” Matron Gaga, but she [Francisca Quaye] got a new job at another health facility just about three kilometres from the New Generation Medical Centre.
The Fourth Estate tracked her there…
Part two of this story will be published on Wednesday, May 24, 2023.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The family of Dora Quaye, a renowned midwife who operated a maternity home in Takoradi, has reached out to The Fourth Estate and denied Francisca Quaye’s claim that she was the daughter of the popular midwife and picked her midwifery knowledge from her. They say she was a distant relative who lived in the Quayes household.
The Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in February 2022, banned a former Board Chair of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA), Prof. Douglas Boateng, from holding public office for two years for failing to declare his assets and liabilities.
The ban was from February 2022 to February 2024.
However, The Fourth Estate can reveal that Prof Boateng did not serve a single day of the two-year penalty. Instead, he has been serving as the board chairman of the Minerals Income Investment Fund (MIIF), the fund that was to manage the controversial Agyapa deal which sought to trade off 49% of the country’s mineral royalties for $500 million from the London and Ghana stock exchanges.
CHRAJ’s decision was as a result of investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni’s exposé, Contract for Sale, which revealed that the then PPA Chief Executive, A.B Adjei, had used his office to help the company he co-owned, Talent Discovery Ltd (TDL), win high-value government contracts which were then sold to the highest bidder.
Antigraft civil society organization, Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), then filed a complaint against the nine-member board of the PPA, which was at the time chaired by Prof. Boateng. The GII said it suspected collusion between the disgraced CEO of the PPA and his board. GII, therefore, asked CHRAJ to investigate all the board members, the board chair, and officials of TDL.
After its investigation, CHRAJ exonerated all members of the board but two: Prof Douglas Boateng and Mr Adjei. While Prof Boateng was banned for two years, the PPA CEO, Adjenim Boateng Adjei, was barred for 10 years.
Documents available to The Fourth Estate show that CHRAJ had on two occasions (in two letters dated August 6, 2020, and September 4, 2020) invited Prof. Boateng to react to the GII’s accusations against him regarding his alleged failure to comply with Article 286(1) of the Constitution and Section 1 (1) of Act 550.
Article 268 (1) of the 1992 Constitution states that “a person who holds a public office mentioned in clause (5) of this Article shall submit to the Auditor-General a written declaration of all property or assets owned by, or liabilities owed by, him whether directly or indirectly (a) within three months after the coming into force of this Constitution or before taking office, as the case may be, (b) at the end of every four years; and (b) at the end of his term of office.”
The Constitution requires the declaration to be done before the public officer takes office. However, Section 1(4)(c) of the Public Office Holders (Declaration of Assets and Disqualification) Act, 550 directs public office holders to meet this requirement not later than six months after taking office, at the end of every four years and not later than six months at the end of his or her term.
It took Prof. Boateng two months to respond to the letters: on October 9, 2020, he said in his defence that he had started the asset declaration process but had not completed it. He cited a misunderstanding of the relevant laws and COVID-19-related disruptions, particularly with international travel, as reasons for the delay. Prof. Boateng was appointed board chairman of the PPA in 2017.
CHRAJ bans Prof. Boateng
Needless to say, CHRAJ disagreed with Prof Boateng’s excuse in its ruling dated February 11, 2022.
“The Commission findshis excusefor not declaring his assets and liabilities not reasonable, and hereby disqualifies him from appointment as Chair or member of any public Board, Council or Commission for a period not less than 2 years from the date of this decision,” the CHRAJ decision stated.
However, there was a qualification.
“The Commission is of the considered view that the disqualification should be limited to public boards, councils and commissions, and not to extend to Public Office generally, except however, that he must comply with the mandatory exit requirement under Article 286(1)(c) to declare his assets and liabilities as a condition for consideration for future appointment to public office. He has 3 months from the date of this decision within which to provide evidence before the Commission that he has complied with Article 286(1) (c).”
Prof. Boateng challenges CHRAJ decision
When The Fourth Estate asked Prof. Boateng why he is still in office as the board chairman of the MIIF when he has been banned from occupying any such position, he said CHRAJ erred.
“I’ve not done anything wrong. CHRAJ got it wrong,” he explained.
He told The Fourth Estate he had instructed his lawyer Andrew Nii Adjei Khartey to write to the commission to review its decision. In evidence, Mr Khartey provided a letter to CHRAJ dated February 24, 2022, in which he asked the commission to review its decision because it believed it had made a mistake in banning his client.
The letter accused CHRAJ of failing to give Prof. Boateng a hearing after it established adverse findings against him in respect of his declaration of assets, which, according to the letter, he did on October 14, 2020.
The letter continued that Prof. Boateng, among other things, believed that the provisions of Article 286 and Section 3, Schedule 1 of Act 550 were misconstrued and unfairly applied to him. Further, it believed the decision did not take into account the full scope of the law regarding asset declaration by public officials.
“Assuming arguendo that the aforementioned provisions are applicable to our client, we respectfully submit that the conclusion arrived at by the Commission suggesting that only the Chairman of a Board is bound by the said provisions is erroneous, and an unfair application of the law.
“Assuming arguendo that the Commission’s findings were justified in law and in procedure, the sanctions applied by the Commission were excessive and harsh, considering the fact that our Client as Board Chairman has in the Commission’s own Decision, been exonerated of all charges of inappropriate conduct including corruption, and conflict of interest.”
It continued:
“No findings regarding unlawful acquisition of assets, defrauding the Republic, engaging in wilful or dishonest or corrupt acts prejudicial to the interests of the Republic, and/or knowingly making a false declaration of his assets, properties or liabilities, were made against our client”
CHRAJ takes 10 months to review decision
After receiving the application for review of the decision, it took CHRAJ 10 months to review its decision. During the 10 months, Prof Boateng was in office as board chairman of the MIIF.
His lawyer, Andrew Khartey, told The Fourth Estate that once the legal team had “applied for a review of the decision, it operated as a stay [of execution] until after CHRAJ comes back to say if it agreed or disagreed” with the application for review.
In its decision dated December 20, 2022, and signed by its Commissioner, Joseph Whittal, CHRAJ said further engagement showed that Prof. Boateng had indeed provided evidence of his assets and liabilities declaration on October 16, 2020, in the form of a receipt, from the Office of the Auditor-General. However, this evidence was not brought to the attention of the Commissioner or the investigative team because it was not accompanied by a letter.
CHRAJ said it relied on Section 18(2) of the CHRAJ Act, 1993 (Act 456) to re-look its decision.
That provision states that:
“If within three months after the report is made no action is taken which seems to the Commission to be adequate and appropriate, the Commissioner, may after considering the comments, if any, made by or on behalf of the department, authority or person against whom the complaint was made, bring an action before any court and seek such remedy as may be appropriate for the enforcement of the recommendations of the Commission.”
This resulted in a shift in CHRAJ’s position on the matter.
“Having carefully considered the comments of Prof. Boateng and all the circumstances of the case, the Commission has come to the conclusion that submitting written declaration of his assets and liabilities to the Auditor General on the 16th of October 2020, about three years after his appointment, does not negate the finding of the Commission that his excuse for not declaring his assets and abilities is not reasonable.”
It continued:
“However, the Commission has taken into consideration steps taken by Prof. Boateng to make a written declaration of his assets and liabilities under Article 286(1)(a) on declaration on assumption of office, and 286(1) (c) on declaration at the end of his term of office. Accordingly, the Commission disqualifies Prof. Douglas Boateng from appointment as Chair or member of any public Board, Council or Commission for a period not less than one year.”
The new decision was to take effect from the date of the original decision— February 11, 2022— which meant that he had only two months left to serve his punishment.
His lawyer, Andrew Khartey explained to The Fourth Estate that his client did not have to serve any punishment because he was already in office and could not have stepped aside for the two months left.
GII’s response
The Ghana Integrity Initiative disagrees. However, it says CHRAJ’s latest decision on the matter lacks transparency.
“It’s curious that the complainant was not involved in the process of the review. GII complained and a decision was taken. If new evidence comes up, it is a matter of natural justice that GII should be brought in the know. To have done this on our blindside is quite curious,” Michael Boadi of GII said.
He said the GII was not even given a copy of the reviewed decision.
He also indicated that per the law, CHRAJ did not have the power to review its decision but “it can accept new evidence which may impact on earlier views expressed.
“If they said they reviewed [the decision] that is not proper but they reopened the case again and reinvestigated, based on fresh evidence that was available to them, then that is in order.”
CHRAJ refuses to comment on The Fourth Estate’s request
In February this year, The Fourth Estate wrote to CHRAJ and requested to know how CHRAJ’s ban affects Prof Douglas Boateng’s current position at the MIIF. It also wanted to know whether, per CHRAJ’s decision, the MIIF qualified to be a public, council or commission board.
In a response to a Right To Information request, CHRAJ Commissioner Joseph Whittal declined to respond to key queries on the grounds that it could prejudice its position if it is petitioned to investigate the matter.
“The refusal of access to the information sought is because disclosure will reveal an expression of opinion of the Commission on the effect of its decision in Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) vs The Board of the Public Procurement Authority in which Prof Douglas Boateng was the [Board] Chairman [of the PPA] and a totally unrelated matter of the allegation being made concerning his role with the Minerals Investment Fund which has not been investigated by the Commission specifically but which is capable of being investigated and therefore, exempt information under section 13(1)(a) of the [RTI] Act,” the letter said.
Must board chairpersons declare their assets?
The asset declaration law require that the President, Vice-President, the Speaker of Parliament, Deputy Speakers of Parliament, members of Parliament, ministers and deputy ministers of state, ambassadors, the Chief Justice, Judges of Superior Court, Judges of Inferior court and managers of public institutions in which the state has interest submit to the Auditor-General written declarations of all property or assets owned by, or liabilities owed by them, whether directly or indirectly.
Prof Boateng’s lawyer, Andrew Nii Adjei Khartey, however, does not believe CHRAJ’s interpretation of the law must include board chairmen.
He said Article 286(5)(i) reference to “Chairman” was about the executive heads of institutions such as chief executive officers, managing directors, and not chairpersons of the boards of directors.
“When chairman is mentioned, the constitution is envisaging people like the CHRAJ boss who is a commissioner, the chairman of the Electoral Commission, the Chairman of the Public Services Commission and not the interpretation CHRAJ gave it,” he suggested.
GII’s Michael Boadi disagrees with Khartey’s characterization and insists that “PPA is a state institution and there is no ambiguity at all in the provision. The provision doesn’t distinguish between an executive chairman and a non-executive chairman. PPA is a state institution and there is no ambiguity at all in the provision.”
Other anti-corruption experts say Article 286(5)(j) ropes in all other public officers who are not mentioned explicitly when the law says, “such officers in the public service and any other public institution as Parliament may prescribe.”
According to Lawyer Adjei Khartey, his client Prof. Boateng intends to go to the Supreme Court for an interpretation of the provision.
Justice Emile Short weighs in
A former Commissioner of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Justice Emile Short, declined to comment on the specific details of the case.
However, he stated that the non-adherence to the asset declaration law stems from the lack of accountability on one side and impunity on the other.
“It is not because it is difficult. Some people are complying: why should it be difficult for other people?” he asked.
Michael Boadi agrees, suggesting that the state institutions responsible for enforcing the law may be complacent.
A tale of little compliance
Anti-corruption crusaders have over the years criticised Ghana’s asset declaration law for lacking transparency.
They want assets and liabilities of public office holders declared to be verified and published when they come to the office and when they leave. However, public officeholders opposed such demands, citing privacy concerns.
The Fourth Estate last year ran a series of stories on asset declarations that point to disregard for compliance with the law.
During President Akufo-Addo’s first term (2017-2021), only 18 out of his 126 ministers declared their assets fully. 18 others failed to declare their assets. For his second term, eight out of 87 ministers did not declare their assets at all as of March last year, while 89 appointees, including the vice-president, did partial declarations.
Under former President Mahama, only 34 out of the 102 ministers who served at one point or the other, fully complied with the law. 56 others declared partially while 11 ministers never declared their assets.
In the current Parliament, 95 legislators have complied with the law. 180 others have not. 85 of them are first-time MPs. This pegs the compliance rate of the legislators at 35%.
294 appointeesincluding ministers, parliamentarians, and judges scurried to comply with the law as of November 2022 after The Fourth Estate series on asset declarations.
Recently, I attended the wedding of a senior high schoolmate. Courtesy of a school tradition that had no consideration of one’s likes and dislikes, we named him ‘Okorto Red’ which literally means ‘red crab’. John hated his nickname but soon acquiesced, realizing that school nicknames follow the good old scientific rule – ‘like poles repel and unlike poles attract’ – the more you fight them, the more they stick.
After the wedding, drenched in catholic tradition, came to an end, we headed to the reception located on the compound of a school within the church to fraternise and catch up with tales of our lives, almost 20 years after school. Some whispered to me how they were itching to hear how Okorto, one of the shiest people in school, finally found his lost rib. Of course, there was the couple’s dance too—Okorto has two left feet.
On our way to the reception, a bold inscription— ‘No vernacular’— screamed at me. I smiled. A veteran of both public and private basic schools in my formative years, it was a familiar caveat.
At the reception, Okorto’s infamous dance moves lived up to expectation. It was as bad as anticipated. We raked memories of the past, and we had a good laugh over Okorto’s story about how he met his wife. In all, my friend’s wedding was a memorable reunion.
On my way to work two weeks ago, Okorto’s wedding and the ‘no vernacular’ sign with its consequences swamped my thoughts. Courtesy of slow traffic, a drama involving a group of junior high students unfurled before my eyes.
“Why are you speaking vernacular?” a male student, who looked like he had been spending too much time in a gym, asked a junior authoritatively.
The question was followed by a knock on the vernacular-speaking junior’s head.
“But why? Are we in school?” he shot back.
This response attracted a flurry of more knocks on the head.
“Are you not in a school uniform?” the school bully asked more enraged.
The much younger culprit wouldn’t take it. The altercation escalated into a full brawl with the victim of the assault going for the jaws of his abuser with a feeble punch.
At this point, I had to stop the melee before one of them ended up in the open drain. I found out the ‘machoman’ was a class prefect and thought it was within his responsibility to enforce the school’s anti-vernacular rule by the roadside.
The victim of those hard knocks was a JHS 1 student.
By the time I completed the mediation, the class prefect understood that the school’s rules said ‘no vernacular here’ which applied ostensibly only in school and not when in school uniform.
“As I advised him to protect his juniors and not assault them even if they broke school rules, I reflected on the politics of language in our society. Why do we claim paternity of the English language while making orphans of our mother tongues?”
Lost identity, lost heritage
In Ghana, most (to my estimation) parents take more pride in their children’s fluency in English than in vernacular. In fact, all private primary school administrations in Ghana ensure that pupils speak only English while on the school premises.
So, at home, school, and everywhere language is needed, English is widely spoken.
I’m equally guilty.
What makes this issue particularly disturbing is that the English we speak is what the Ama Ata Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing at AUCC term as ‘Ghanglish’, a bastardized version of the real thing. ‘Ghanglish’ is where the phonology, grammar, semantics, syntax, elocutions, and pragmatics employed are more akin to those of our indigenous languages than that of English. So why are we stressing our children?
According to experts, the use of native African languages is declining, particularly among middle- to upper-class African millennials and Generation Z. This means the next generation of African leaders, including our politicians and academics, will speak English as their first, and possibly only, language.
Alas, this becomes another one of our self-inflicted factors, in addition to a haunting colonial past, migration, globalization, urbanization and a counter-intuitive educational system responsible for Africa’s identity crisis.
In a BBC report titled ‘Africa’s lost language: How English can fuel an identity crisis’ the author spoke to a number of millennials whose parents forced them to speak English.
“To learn English, I immersed myself with white kids. I didn’t want to associate myself with the black kids any more. It was really difficult,” a South African teenager recalled.
She said she’s unable to hold a conversation without turning to English words – an experience she described as being “colonised by English”.
According to the story, the 17-year-old’s fluency had come with the realization of how, not only being able to speak English, but speaking it in a certain way, could open or close doors in South Africa.
In the case of her Nigerian counterpart, when she was growing up in Lagos, English was the only language she was allowed to speak. Her Igbo parents took her English language skills rather seriously, and as a young girl, she was made to attend an etiquette class where diction was a key component of the lessons.
Fortunately, these two are now focusing on correcting what they described as the errors of their past.
Which Ghanaian languages are in trouble?
In a research paper titled ‘Some Endangered Languages of Ghana’, Jonas and Rebecca Akpanglo-Nartey found that Ghanaian languages are currently under threat as grandparents speak only local languages, parents speak both the native language and the language of assimilation (in our case English), and their children become monolingual in the assimilated language. This means, in certain cases, your parents, who live in the same country as you, cannot communicate with your children.
Are we getting to a point where grandparents can’t converse with their grandchildren? Credit: Getty Images
Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, described the situation as a linguistic famine in African societies, which he observed was the result of prizing foreign languages over native languages.
True, it hasn’t been all rosy among the native speakers of the various ethnic languages. The inability of some natives to speak other ethnic languages has created social and economic barriers. This has contributed to the dominance of certain languages at the expense of others that are threatened with extinction.
For instance, Ghana is a multilingual country with over 80 ethnic languages, a reflection of the rich cultural diversity of its people, some will say. However, this number of languages can be a curse rather than a blessing. Language barriers can be a source of tension and unwarranted conflicts. There have been several situations where people have complained about the treatment meted out to them due to their inability to speak a particular local language.
In 2021, I was returning from a funeral in Aflao in the Volta Region when the public vehicle I rode in got stopped at an immigration barrier a few kilometres after Agbozume. I had no identification card on me and so I explained to the officer my mission and volunteered the information that I was actually from the Volta Region. Oddly enough, a fellow passenger, in a bid to ascertain my ‘Ghanaianness’, suggested I speak Twi, not my ethnic Ewe, to validate my claim.
That incident confirmed Akpanglo-Nartey’s research mentioned above. She discovered that Ahanta and Nzema are both losing grounds to Fante. Larteh and Kyerepong seem to be losing grounds to Twi. Ga and Dangme are both losing to Twi, while the Togo-Mountain languages, namely Avatime, Logba, Santrokofi, Siwu and others, face threats from Ewe and Twi, which are widely spoken.
The conflicts and tensions language barrier creates feed into the beliefs of those who are happy to dispatch our local languages to the graveyard of dead languages. These critics argue that there is virtually no evidence backing the idea that a country can create and sustain economic growth while at the same time maintaining the same level of language diversity currently prevailing in most African countries.
This assertion of opponents of linguistic diversity however cannot be true because some of the world’s most advanced countries, including China and Australia are equally diverse in languages with more than 200 tongues. Even highly industrialized Singapore (which played in the league of underdeveloped countries in the early 1950s) speaks at least four languages.
Saving the fallen
Though the state has failed at its primary responsibility to promote the use of our local languages, it is good to know that others are concerned and working on it.
While the language roots are still intact, more or less, institutions like the Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy and Bible Translation (GILLBT) are doing their bit to ensure that they thrive. Thanks to them, you can now read the bible in 37 local Ghanaian languages.
That is not all.
GILLBT has also employed volunteers in various communities and equipped them with the necessary resources to train and educate indigenes on how to read and write their local languages.
Ghana introduced a bilingual policy dubbed the ‘National Literacy Acceleration Programme’ which specifies that the most common local language in a school’s community must be used for academic instruction from kindergarten to primary 3.
As part of its implementation, eleven local languages, namely Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi, Fante, Ga, Nzema, Ewe, Kasem, Dagaare, Dagbani, Gonja, and Dangbe are to be used as a medium of instruction. This was after research revealed that only 18% of pupils in lower primary could read and write in their local language. Although Ghana’s language policy makes a case for the use of our mother tongue as a medium of instruction in our schools from kindergarten to lower primary, even the public schools have not given it a thought. As for the private ones such an idea is unthinkable.
In most public schools in Ghana, speaking a local language comes with a cost
The elite in society, as well as government, must pay more attention not to promote the use of foreign languages at the expense of indigenous languages. This is not wrong per se, but it is important that as we pride ourselves in our ability to rattle a foreign language, we do not forget our roots.
We have borrowed enough; there are signs on the walls pointing towards Ngugi’s ‘linguistic famine’ if we don’t act now. Our elders urge: “A wise person must know the language, sayings, and tales of his society.”
An Accra high court has set May 25, 2023, to deliver judgment in the contempt case brought by Lighthouse Chapel International (LCI) against six of its former pastors. The pastors have accused the church of a plethora of wrongdoings, ranging from economic exploitation to abuse in another suit. They resigned and sued the church in 2021.
The pastors’ story was published by The Fourth Estate shortly after they filed their suit seeking justice for the non-payment of their Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) contributions, alleged underpayment of their salaries, and emotional abuse among others.
Lighthouse filed a contempt of court against the six pastors, and the judgment was supposed to be delivered on April 28, 2023. Justice Frank Aboagye Rockson had ordered the two parties to file their submission by March 29, 2023, but when the case was called on Friday, it came to light that the church had failed to file its written submission.
Neither the church nor its lawyers were in court when the case was called.
The judge asked the lawyer for the respondents (the six former LCI pastors) if he had been served with the submissions.
“No, my lord. I haven’t,” the lawyer, Mr. Kofi Bentil, said.
Asked about the last time the court sat on the matter, Mr. Bentil said it was March 15, 2023, and added that the judge had ordered that the parties should file their submissions by March 29, 2023.
After combing through his documents, the judge agreed with Mr. Bentil and stated that the respondents had filed their written submissions as ordered by the court.
“Under the circumstances, a date would be given for the ruling based on what is so far before me,” the judge said before assigning May 25, 2023, as the judgment day.
Mr. Bentil asked that the court award a cost of GHc 3,000 against the church for failing to do the needful.
The court agreed.
Background
LCI’s case
The LCI’s claims that the respondents are in contempt of court for three reasons. It said the six former pastors of the church gave interviews to The Fourth Estate, which were published, and that the pastors did not include all the details of these interviews in their court filings. The church also said The Fourth Estate publications cast the church in a negative light.
The church brought a contempt suit against The Fourth Estate for publishing the articles. The Fourth Estate was found guiltybut has appealed the judgment. The church also wants its former employees punished for contempt.
Ingredients of contempt
In his written submission to the court, Counsel for the former LCI pastors, Kofi Bentil, argued that the act of contempt of court in Ghana requires specific elements that must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. These, he said, include intentional disobedience of court orders or denigration of the court, both inside or outside of the courtroom during ongoing legal proceedings. Additionally, it must be shown that the accused had the intention to commit contempt and acted accordingly.
To be held in contempt of a courtin Ghana, the lawyer further said, the accused must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have conceived and acted in a way that defied or disobeyed the orders of a court, or in a way that denigrated the court either in the face of the court or outside the court during a period when the court is adjudicating the issue in contention.
Mr. Bentil argued that contempt of court was a conduct that undermined the authority and dignity of a court, defined as the crime of disobeying a court order or showing disrespect to a judge. He said that to be found guilty of contempt, there must be a court seized with the matter.
According to court documents, the respondents contend that contempt of court is typically only applied to actions that happen after a court has started dealing with a case. This is because it requires serious and clear actions that violate the law. He said in this particular case, the applicants (the church) had not provided sufficient evidence to prove such actions, and the respondents had not behaved badly enough to warrant this severe punishment.
He said: “It is extremely pertinent to note that in this court, My Lord the Judge had occasion to admonish the parties and charge them to stay out of the media circus surrounding this case. In that admonishment, My Lord the Judge commended the parties for restraining themselves so far. What is pertinent here is that this admonishment and commendation came after the publication of Darkness in a Lighthouse. Witness for Applicant admitted recollecting this admonishment. It stands to reason therefore that as would be expected of a court, this court had not considered the events before that date as contemptuous, and was proceeding with the matter before it, not matters outside the court.”
The respondents claim that they had tried to settle the issues with their employer outside of court, but their attempts were unsuccessful. The Fourth Estate got wind of it and approached them for interviews, which they gave. These interviews, they said, happened before they decided to take legal action against the church.
Court is not scandalised, disrupted, thwarted
“Respondents did everything to avoid court action because the applicant herein is far better resourced than them, but when all failed, instead of giving up, and with the support of friends and family, they ran to the law. It is not true that they were bent on coming to court,” the six pastors said in their defence.
“Respondents, therefore, have no doubt that this court is not scandalised, disrupted, thwarted nor tormented by the contents of interviews given long before writs were filed and would not consider them as contemptuous of this court, because it is clear about what is before it and what is not, and would not be prejudiced by extraneous matters,” Mr. Bentil said in the court document.
Furthermore, the respondents said the church was aggrieved that the interviews cast it in bad light and wished to project their displeasure and discomfort onto the court and suggest that the court was offended and had experienced contempt because applicants were offended.
“We are confident this court appreciates the media interest around this case, but will not assume the pain of parties herein, or turn the displeasure of parties into its own and declare contempt when a party is displeased with external issues unless the conduct is truly contemptuous and not a strained effort to stretch the law of contempt to fight partisan battles,” they argued.
Asking the court to dismiss the case and award cost against the church, Mr. Bentil argued that the applicants [the church] were asking the court to be offended on their behalf and punish the respondents (the six former LCI pastors) for conduct that they believe is disrespectful.
Editor’s Note:Beyond proceedings in court on Friday, this story also relied on the written submission filed by the respondents. The Church failed to file its submission so that information is not available to this media outlet. The story will be updated if the applicant (the Lighthouse Chapel) files its submission.
A resident of Navrongo has filed a lawsuit seeking the removal of Prof. Eric Magnus Wilmot, the Vice-Chancellor of C.K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences. He is also seeking the removal of Dr. V.A. Ankamah-Lomotey, the university’s registrar, on the grounds that the two are above the retirement age and are, therefore, ineligible to hold their positions.
Apart from their removal from office, the plaintiff, Joseph Pwoawuvi Weguri, wants the court to order the two defendants to refund all monies, including salaries and allowances, they received from the Consolidated Fund and/or from the university, and costs, including his (Mr. Weguri’s) legal fees.
The Fourth Estate reported in October last year that the appointment of the two retirees had become a matter of concern for the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), which expressed reservations about the university’s decision to appoint them to substantive positions.
The plaintiff describes in his suit filed on March 20, 2023, as “unlawful, arbitrary, and illegal” actions in relation to the two university officials’ appointments and wants the court to nullify it.
Also joined to the suit are the university, located in Navrongo in the Upper East Region, and the Attorney General.
The plaintiff contends that the Act establishing the university mandates it to appoint its officers, including a vice-chancellor and Registrars, in accordance with the statutes of the university. However, the plaintiff claims that the appointing authorities violated the public service laws of Ghana, especially Article 199 of the Constitution, 1992, by allowing the public officers to remain in full-term employment after they attained the age of compulsory retirement.
The plaintiff also claims that the GTEC cautioned public universities on appointments and post-retirement contracts in a circular dated June 8, 2021. Despite this warning, the university, by letters dated December 1, 2020, appointed Prof. Eric Magnus Wilmot as Vice-Chancellor and Dr. V.A. Ankamah-Lomotey, as Registrar of the institution for full terms of four (4) years each.
The plaintiff further alleges that before his appointment as the substantive vice-chancellor, Prof Wilmot, who had retired as a public officer of the University of Cape Coast in 2019, was first appointed interim vice-chancellor of the institution. Although Prof. Wilmot and Dr. Ankamah-Lomotey have attained the ages of compulsory retirement, they have remained in full-term employment of the university and have been receiving salaries and allowances from the Consolidated Fund.
Mr. Weguri, who contested the 2016 parliamentary election on the ticket of the Peoples National Convention (PNC), contends that the continuous occupation of office and withdrawal of salaries and allowances by the two university administrators after they have attained the age of compulsory retirement and after Prof Wilmot had retired from the public service is not only unlawful but also illegal.
He claims that while Prof. Wilmot turned 60 years in April 2022, Dr. Ankamah-Lomotey attained 60 years in August 2021.
He further claims that the defendants (the university and the government) acted in an unlawful, arbitrary, and capricious manner by giving full-term employment to the two after they attained compulsory retirement age and after Prof. Wilmot had retired from public service.
The plaintiff further states that the university did not follow laid down procedures in appointing the two, which included constituting a search party, publishing vacancies, and shortlisting applicants for interviews to select suitable persons for the positions, including the positions of Vice-Chancellor and registrars.
The plaintiff said he had petitioned the Minister of Education and the university for the removal of the two university officials, but the petition was dismissed on unjustifiable grounds.
In the petition dated, November 21, 2022, Mr. Weguri pointed out that the irregularities in the appointment of Prof. Wilmot and Ankamah-Lomotey, “are inconsistent with Article 199 of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana (as amended by Act 527-Amendment Act 1996).
The law states that:
“Notwithstanding clause (1) of this article, a public officer who retired from the public service after attaining the age of sixty years may where the exigencies of the service require, be engaged for a limited period of not more than two years at a time but not exceeding five years in all and upon such other terms and conditions as the appointing authority shall determine.”
According to the petition, it was in compliance with this provision of the Constitution that President Nana Akufo-Addo first appointed the duo in an interim capacity in May 2020.
However, the petition pointed out that the then Minister of Education, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh; the Director-General of GTEC and the Governing Council of CKT-UTAS violated the 1992 Constitution by appointing them into substantive positions with effect from September 2020 in a letter dated December 1, 2020, for a full term of four (4) years.
“This Act of impunity is also frowned upon by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission Directive on reengagement of retired employees of Higher Education Institutions which states among other things that ‘persons who are re-engaged after retirement subject to permission cannot be assigned position holding roles nor draw allowances due a person still in active service.’”
He asserted, “It is worthy of emphasis that even where the government would approve post-retirement contract appointments in public universities, it is usually to non-office holding positions and the skills of the retiring officer must be in short supply and unavoidably needed.”
Timeline of events.
Governing Council’s response to allegations
Meanwhile, the university’s Governing Council in a letter dated January 12, 2023, responded to Mr Weguri’s allegations. The letter signed by the Professor Gordon A. Awandare, the Chairman of Governing Council CKT-UTAS, acknowledged that in May 2020, Prof Wilmot and Dr Ankamah-Lomotey, were given interim appointments for a year.
“The Governing Council when duly constituted was given the mandate to regularise the appointments of the vice-chancellor and registrar. At the time of their appointment, the vice-chancellor was 58 years old while the registrar was 59 years old. In pursuit of its mandate to appoint a VC and Registrar, the Governing Council constituted a committee, chaired by an eminent retired professor, to interview and ascertain the suitability or otherwise of the two officers.”
It continued: “The committee therefore subjected the officers to a rigorous interview and submitted its report to the Governing Council. Council discussed and approved the report and then formally sought and obtained approval from the Minister of Education through the Director General of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) to offer full four-year terms of office to Professor Eric Magnus Wilmot as vice-chancellor and Dr V. A. Ankamah-Lomotey as registrar, spanning September 2020 to August 2024,” it said in response to the allegations of wrongdoing.
Gross incompetence
According to the letter, although there have been accusations of incompetence, the council has regularly received quarterly reports from the vice-chancellor and has been content with the management’s overall performance and the progress being made.
“We do not believe there is ‘gross incompetence’. As is the case in every new institution, challenges exist, and [the] council is providing the needed supervision to management to tackle the challenges and provide a solid foundation for the university,” it said.
Background
The Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC) last year expressed reservations about the increasing number of post-retirement contract staff appointed to positions in stated-funded higher education institutions (PFHEI).
GTEC has stated that people who are re-engaged after retirement cannot be assigned position-holding roles nor draw allowances due to a person still in active service. The integrated personnel payroll department and budget department of the commission was instructed not to process the emoluments of any post-retired staff without the required evidence after August 1, 2021.
However, it has been revealed that Professor Eric Magnus Wilmot, a university retiree holding a substantive top position of vice-chancellor, Dr. Vincent A. Ankamah-Lomotey, have both been given substantive appointments that would keep them in office after their retirement age of 60.
Professor Wilmot retired voluntarily in 2019 from the University of Cape Coast (UCC), where he was the Provost of the College of Education Studies for three years. In 2020, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo granted him an interim appointment for only one year as vice-chancellor for the CKT-UTAS. The interim appointment was due to elapse in July 2021. But before the appointment elapsed, the university’s governing council issued its own appointment to Prof. Wilmot, giving him four years to serve further as vice-chancellor.
The post-retirement appointment of Prof. Wilmot as vice-chancellor took effect on September 1, 2020. He is due to retire again in 2024, and when he does, he will be entitled to some benefits as per the conditions of his post-retirement service at the CKT-UTAS.
The Registrar of CKT-UTAS, Dr. Vincent A. Ankamah-Lomotey, was a former deputy registrar of the College of Science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). President Akufo-Addo gave him an interim appointment in 2020 for one year as the registrar of the CKT-UTAS. He was a little over 59 years at the time, with barely a year to hit the mandatory retirement age of 60.
Months before the one-year interim appointment was to elapse in July 2021, the school’s governing council offered him a four-year appointment. Both the retiree vice-chancellor and the registrar are no longer serving the president’s one-year interim appointments, which elapsed in July 2021. They are currently serving in substantive positions on full-term appointments issued by the governing council, contrary to the rules governing such appointments in public universities in Ghana.
When The Fourth Estate contacted the vice-chancellor on the post-retirement appointment, he stated that no rule had been broken, and he was performing his role, so he deserved his post-retirement earnings. When the registrar was asked about the issue, he did not provide any response.
Selasie Awaworyie went into labour at 7.45pm on May 21, 2021. But there was a complication: the baby which weighed 4kg got stuck in the birth canal for almost 30 minutes.
