Highly-admired broadcast journalist, Kwame Sefa Kayi, host of the Kokrokoo Morning Show on Peace 104.3 FM has called on well-meaning individuals and corporate bodies to contribute to an ongoing campaign to purchase some 100 incubators for health facilities across Ghana.
The campaign, known as ‘Project 100 Incubators’, is the brain child of the Kokrokoo Charities Foundation which is aimed at reducing the alarming figures of infant mortality in Ghana.
“We have to do this. I want us all to look back and say, we did it. And there would be people who would benefit from it. And those people are not people that we necessarily know or may even know. 37 Military Hospital at a point had to operate the incubator in shifts for babies. If the big hospitals are in this condition what about the small ones. So if your baby has to be in the incubator for two hours. After 45 minutes, you have to take your child out because somebody else has to put their child in. Where is our national conscience? What is going on here? It just unsettles me. And sometimes people who you know can afford it do not seem to care. But we would try it and we would do it,” Sefa Kayi said in an interview he granted to Nana Aba Anamoah on the State Of Affairs television show aired last Monday.
He continued, “Primarily, we have to give back to society. Especially those of us who have risen out of our own ashes to become who we have become. We have some influence to leverage on it. We have to help people because there is a lot of poverty around us and there is so much we can do. You and I are a bit more comfortable than we were some 10 or 15 years ago and touch wood, we would never go back into those days. So let’s raise somebody as well as we go along. Just take one person and if you can, lift the person up. You would be helping a lot more people than you know.”
The ace broadcast journalist explained that it would not be prudent to solely rely on government to provide some of such crucially needed amenities because the burden and demand on governments is huge and varied.
Sefa Kayi, however, expressed disappointment that despite the scarce resources available, there are reports of persons who use money in a way perceived to be frivolous.
“Of course it would break my heart if I have to buy an incubator for $10,000 and someone polishes off $35 million in one fell swoop. I am like ‘hello what are we talking about? Are we that rich?’ So rich that one person can walk away with $35 million, another person can do something else and it is two three million dollars gone down the drain. So when you hear those stories, it breaks you a bit and it depresses you sometimes too and you are like ‘really?’
“I don’t know. Honestly I don’t know. When you hear some of these stories, you ask yourself ‘what is going on?’ Do these people feel any compulsion to stop and think before they do what they do or is it simply because it is about them and what they would get or what they stand to get. Is that all it is? So what happened to love for the country? What happened to feeling some empathy and sympathy for other people? What happened to giving back to society? What happened to all those little values that we were taught; love thy neighbour as thy self, look out for the underprivileged and the weak person? What happened to all of that? Have we sacrificed that on the altar of making money? Is that all there is to life?” he asked.
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