IT is not for the sake of personal aggrandisement nor empty platitudes that the State sets up public offices and appoints public officers to man them.
Those offices and officers are there principally to serve the people, who are the owners of the offices and who, through their sweat and toil, pay taxes to sustain them.
People, regardless of their gender, age, political persuasion, social status, etc, are entitled to be accorded dignified services in institutions of state when they so stand in need of them.
This constitutes a form of social contract, in which the people agree to fund the institutions, in return for dedicated and selfless services from the officers entrusted to man them.
It, therefore, goes without saying that this duty of public servants to the people, of necessity, includes the duty to take proper care of public property put in their custody and ensure that the property is maintained or rehabilitated, as and when the need arises.
Only last Friday an incident happened at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra during one of the surprise visits by President John Evans Atta Mills which clearly brought out the ineptitude of some public officers at the hospital and the reneging of their responsibilities to the people.
In the course of his tour, the President realised that basic facilities such as lifts were not functioning at key facilities such as the multi-storey Surgical Block and he had to issue directives to the Ministry of Health to replace the obsolete lift at the unit (see pages 16/49).
We are saddened by this state of affairs at no mean a place than our premier hospital, Korle-Bu.
Should it take a visit by the President for efforts to be made by the authorities at the hospital, and for that matter the Ministry of Health, to rectify problems affecting basic facilities such as a lift?
Were the authorities there oblivious of the fact that the lift was not working? Or did they feel that the non-functioning of the lift was immaterial to healthcare delivery at the hospital and, therefore, maintained a lackadaisical attitude towards it? Did they really think about the comfort and well-being of their patients or clients?
Our concern here is heightened by the fact that what is happening at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital may be happening in many public offices where officials may be struggling over one another to exhibit an abysmal level of incompetence and ineptitude.
If one may ask again, can and, indeed, must the President be everywhere before such simple things are rectified or done right?
We believe that the time to practically hold public officers to account for their acts of commission or omission is now and that this must go beyond the usual “action will be taken soon” to positive sanctions.
No one can tell how many lives may have been lost or damaged for all the time the lift remained malfunctioning until the President’s intervention.
We recall that Dr George Sipa-Adjah Yankey, a former Minister of Health, and his successor, Dr Benjamin Kunbour, had at various times toured health facilities and issued similar directives.
The fact that these shortcomings persist serve notice of the need for more drastic action before more lives are lost.
We wonder how our hospital authorities (and those elsewhere where such facilities are also not working) expect our physically challenged brothers and sisters who have as much the same rights as any of us to such facilities at the hospital to access health care without lifts, given the absence of any other means for them to do so.
Let us embrace the practice of firing public officers who are derelict of duty or are incompetent.
It is only by so doing that people will sit up and take the right and prompt decisions to move the fortunes of our public offices forward.
Enough of this incompetence.
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