A cartel involved in drug thefts caused Ghana’s Upper East Regional Hospital to run out of medicines for years until they finally ran out of luck on Friday, 4 August 2023. During the period in which they outsmarted the system, several patients suffered preventable deaths. And the conditions of other sick persons seeking healthcare services at the facility deteriorated as they were turned away because the government hospital was short of drugs at its pharmacy. Patients in queue for drugs, some of which are not available at the hospital owing to thefts. When Media Without Borders launched an investigation into public complaints about drug shortages at the hospital, it trailed the illegal movements of drugs from the hospital’s stores for months, finally uncovering a near-abandoned structure where the stolen medications were being hidden, pending resale miles outside the region. The hospital’s stores where the staff steal the drugs from. Before the undercover monitoring began in 2022, the drug thefts were already going on. Tons of government drugs, packaged in boxes labelled with a bold notice that the medications were NOT FOR SALE, had been stolen and sold by the cartel. The Upper East Regional Hospital. No fewer than 34 boxes were found when Media Without Borders’ Edward Adeti gained access into the hiding place on Thursday, 3 August 2023. The boxes contained drips, doses of injection powder, metronidazole injections, antimalarial tablets and anaesthesia among others. The 34 boxes, procured and dispatched by the Ministry of Health to the hospital, were the second batch of medicines stolen from the stores in July alone. A cross-section of the stolen drugs captured by Media Without Borders at the hiding place. Mode of operation The hiding place is located just behind the Holy Ghost Temple branch of the Assemblies of God in the region’s capital, Bolgatanga. It is facing the southward fence wall of the official residence of the Upper East Regional Supervising High Court Judge. Stolen drips kept in the hiding place. And it is a few steps away from a road lined on either side by the mostly two-storey houses of other judges, the region’s topmost state security chiefs and the Catholic Bishop of the Navrongo-Bolgatanga Diocese. To avoid the public eye, the hospital staff involved in the illicit drug relocation and resale often move the drugs from the hospital at night to the hiding place. And for the same reason, they always move them from the place under the dark cloak of the pre-dawn hours to the Northern Region for sale. The stolen batch of medicines is due to expire in 2025. But before a driver, who normally comes with a pickup from the Northern Region to take the medicines away, leaves Bolgatanga, he secures an invoice from private pharmacies in the region to deceive police at checkpoints that the drugs were lawfully bought from these private pharmacies. The police are easily outfoxed on the road by the driver because they scarcely care to check to see if there is a notice on the boxes that the materials are not for sale. Media Without Borders alerts police to effect arrests There are some of the hospital’s staff members from whom the internal members of the cartel have kept this secret. Later, it came to the management’s notice, with pictures of some of the stolen drugs from an inside source. But how to locate the hiding place remained a challenge for the hospital’s management. Media Without Borders could not approach any of the hospital’s management members at the time with its findings on the grounds of trust. The structure where the stolen drugs were being kept. At this time, the cartel had got a hint, too, that a spotlight was closing in on where they were keeping the drugs patients needed urgently at the hospital. Clients in queue to pay for drugs at the hospital. They planned to move the drugs from there as immediately as possible to another location, pending their passage to the resale destination. Because of this, Media Without Borders kept a closer eye on the hiding place and finally revealed the findings to trusted officials of the Ghana Police Service on the morning of Friday, 4 August 2023. It is boldly written on the boxes by the Ministry of Health that the medications are not for sale. At about 8:30 pm on Friday, a red-shirted driver at the hospital by the name of Raymond Asoke, who has been part of the syndicate, drove a red car with registration number GE 1532-21 to the yard where the medicines were kept. When he started packing the boxes into the car, Media Without Borders alerted a team of armed police officers already standing by. The law enforcers arrived in no time on a police pickup and halted on the edge of the fenceless, weedy yard. The car captured by Media Without Borders as the driver was loading the boxes of stolen medicines to relocate them pending transportation to the Northern Region for resale. On seeing them, the driver quickly dropped a box he was carrying towards the car and began to move away from the yard on his feet at a hurried pace. The officers, numbering about seven, stormed into the yard in scattered directions, and scurried after him as they shouted for him not to move further. He was outpaced, captured, handcuffed and interrogations began. Hospital’s administrator says drug thieving happening for the past two years During preliminary interrogations at the scene, the driver disclosed that the boxes contained medicines and that Fasilat Raheem, the hospital’s storekeeper whom he repeatedly referred to as Hajia, sent him to convey the drugs from the location. He said the red car belonged to the same storekeeper. And just moments after saying so, he got a phone call from the storekeeper. Placed on a loudspeaker, the storekeeper was heard questioning the reasons for his delay at the location. The thefts have hurt thousands of patients as well as the state over the years. The driver had loaded twelve boxes inside the car
Theresa Kufuor
