Edwinology’s Lab: The doctor who prescribed fertilizer as cure for malaria

The dark side of encouraging entrepreneurship is that people begin to see their jobs as a sinking ship and so jump ship.

If success is about finding problems and solving them then in a sense, we will have a sort of load shedding of human resources.

During load shedding, ECG finds a problem of darkness in Alajo and goes to solve that problem by pulling the plug from Tantra Hills. A problem solved; a problem created.

And that is how people are being encouraged to go into business. A great many people don’t have to be entrepreneurs. A great many.

They must be very comfortable to stick and stay on the job they have and die doing it with all their might.

If a doctor buys into this false galore of entrepreneurship, he could get a 100-acre Mango farm at Somanya and shuffle between the ward and seedlings.

And it is exactly this divided attention that will jam his senses and get him to write down fertilizer NPK15-15-15 as drugs for his patient suffering malaria.

This country has an obligation towards the most sensitive layer of professionals. Teachers, doctors and nurses. They are the people who must not have the look of regret on Monday morning.

Doctors keep people from dying senselessly and teachers keep others from becoming senseless in the first place.

Those who are true to these professions have always done so with a desire to serve for God made them so.

But if silly free-market economists start drawing diagrams and graphs to show that their abundant skills could make them victims of a soulless cut-throat economy;

If some successful businessman stands before them to explain they could have his crass advantage of material wealth; then we would have sowed the seed of discontent in their souls – that raging chemical that discolours their white passion into something as ugly of the colours on the 100 Cedi note.

Then nurses and nursery teachers will keep a nursery of tomato seeds at Sogakope.

Patients would then need to have some patience as they drive back to Accra to fix a drip or diaper.

And if they are too proud to be patient, then they must be humble enough to die.

E-Lab feels this country is not doing enough for teachers and medical professionals. Of course, we can all fault the professionalism we see in hospitals and classrooms.

The deterioration of standards – something that is permeating every fibre of Ghanaian society.

But these professionals must not be made to start thinking it is a waste of abilities to work all their lives in a classroom or theatre.

Everybody has the innate abilities to do a lot of things but Jesus said of Mary, one thing is needful and Mary has taken it.

Sometimes success can mean finding a problem but minding your own business. Because a patient is dying.