By Amadu Lamrana Bah
Dear His Excellency Julius Maada Bio, Vice President of the Republic of Sierra Leone, Moinina David Sengeh, and Dr. Austin Demby, a child died yesterday at the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital because your government couldn’t provide electricity to the hospital.
Like the many stories of how things are bad, we all read how Dr. Jeredine George, a Specialist Obstetrician Gynecologist, and her colleagues had to use phone torches to examine patients. How some babies couldn’t get oxygen, and those who needed oxygen while in their mother’s wombs couldn’t get it either, and a baby had to die immediately after surgery.
At a time when our ruling class and politicians spend the weekend between New York and Europe and fly out to lecture at Harvard, sit and flaunt in expensive SUVs we as a country cannot provide twenty-four hours electricity to our health facilities.
For once, imagine your wife in labor, and there’s no light. Your child couldn’t survive due to a power outage. Dr. George wasn’t writing a script for a Sollywood movie on Netflix. She experienced this on Monday, 22nd April 2024, at the Princess Christian Maternity Hospital (PCMH), popularly known as Cottage.
In other places, this will cause outrage, but as Resilient as we are, we are reading and moving on as if everything is normal.
Those who promised us better health care don’t take their kids to PCMH or any public hospital. Some even have medical insurance overseas.
At a time when a critical infrastructure like one of the main referral hospitals in the city goes without electricity, I am not sure President Lodge or the residence of the Vice President has gone without electricity throughout this crisis.
Like Dr. George, we are all not asking for anything extraordinary or something that can’t be done. Just give us the basic things you are also enjoying, like 24 hours of electricity. We are all humans, and the only thing you have that we don’t have is political leadership after you were elected.
Sadly, even when the rest of us like that innocent child are left on our own we are quick to defend politicians who enjoy social services.
Dear Dr. George, our thoughts are with you and your colleagues. We appreciate all your sacrifices to save lives.
May you continue to have the courage and strength to continue to serve humanity.
To all of us, tonight, think about what will happen if you’re sick and taken to a public hospital with no electricity. Think about your wife and children. Your relatives and friends who cannot afford private hospitals. This could have been any of us or our relatives.
And they are now telling us to pray as if we didn’t even before they came to power.
This E Mona Gbain Gbain…
#FreetownStories
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