A “CABAL” WE CAN FEEL BUT CANNOT SEE
Dr Francis Ibrahim-Betonsi has been pointing at a “cabal” in the health sector as a force that has been working against him because of his ‘immovable’ stance against some alleged evils being perpetrated by some powers said to have links everywhere inside that sector.
I’m told the “cabal” at a point even press-ganged him to join its “secret cult” but he declined. Whilst fighting for his reinstatement through a series of news reports for a whole year between 2017 and 2018, I stepped on some big toes (with no pride and with no regrets) at the Ghana Medical Association, the Ghana Medical and Dental Council, the headquarters of the Ghana Health Service, the Effia Nkwanta Regional Hospital, et cetera. They had no choice but to reinstate and to promote the long-tormented doctor after 6 years of a wrongful dismissal from the Ghana Health Service from 2012 to 2018.
Just last week, I visited the Upper East Regional Hospital (where he works currently) and engaged the management’s head over an alleged nonpayment of some allowances due him. My findings (as you can read in the report published today) show that the concerned sources inside the hospital (who gave me the tipoff) sound more honest than the hospital’s management over the allowances said to have been denied the doctor. The letter the management’s head had written and signed earlier on the allowances contradicts what the same management’s head told me later.
When you watch the American action film dubbed “Hard Target” by John Woo featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme, you would see a black man being hunted at night by an armed gang in the opening minutes of the movie. The man runs into a street so exhausted as he is being pursued. He approaches some passersby for emergency help. Everybody turns away from him because they seem not to see those who are hunting him to kill. They deduce he is out of his mind as they do not see what he is desperately talking about.
As his silent hunters draw nearer from behind with lethal arms to open fire on him, the rejected man turns around helplessly with no choice but to face the approaching assassins in a surrender posture. He looks deeply sad as he has to face his fate in that slightly illuminated street. The ruthless hit men open fire. They riddle his body everywhere with bullets.
It is only after the doubting passersby (who refused to help him when he approached them) hear the sound of gunfire that they realise the assassins are real and, then, begin to run for cover as the man drops dead in a slow motion.
The “cabal” Dr Ibrahim-Betonsi has been talking about could be as real as the assassins whom the black man in the movie “Hard Target” struggles to explain to the unsuspecting passersby. I have been looking at the human-right issue in Dr Ibrahim-Betonsi’s struggles and I have always caught the authorities involved in his reported ordeal ‘pants down’ since 2017. The “cabal” Dr Ibrahim-Betonsi is referring to could just be the “demonic spirit” a great friend of mine (Joseph Ziem) accurately alluded to earlier in the day.
Maybe it is only after this doctor drops dead some ‘passersby’ will realise (as in Hard Target) that the “cabal” he is talking about is real. We all know there is a cabal in every society and that those who stand against the interests of such sects do have a price to pay for being different. Perhaps, the “cabal” which he is pointing at is real and this is the price he has to pay. But that is where I stand. There is no price to pay for human rights so long as you are human.
By Edward Adeti