The Ranking Member on Parliament’s Economy and Development Committee, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has voiced sharp concern regarding deteriorating health sector indicators, highlighting a surge in neonatal deaths and increasingly sluggish ambulance response times.
These disturbing details were highlighted in the 2025 Annual Progress Report.
According to the MP, the report underscores an urgent demand for heightened accountability across Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs).
He urged these institutions to deliver transparent, precise, and verifiable accounts demonstrating how state funds are being spent and what exact results are being achieved.
Discussing the core remit of the Economy and Development Committee, Mr Oppong Nkrumah noted that the Ghanaian public is now far more focused on the real-world impact of public spending, rather than merely identifying administrative accounting flaws.
“The people of Ghana are not just interested in who has misapplied or applied some money in a particular way that you get at the Public Accounts Committee,” he said.
“They want to also see what the targets are that we have set for ourselves as a country, what the money has done in terms of fulfilling those targets.”
He elaborated that a vital duty of the committee is evaluating whether state expenditure actually converts into tangible gains across national development benchmarks.
Citing the health sector to illustrate his point, the former Information Minister revealed that during a recent committee hearing, data proved neonatal mortality was rising despite financial resources being directed toward curbing infant deaths.
“In the last health hearing that we had, neonatal mortality is getting worse in Ghana. It’s in the report.
This is the committee where they have to come and answer questions for when you took the money to go and reduce neonatal mortality: have you succeeded or have you failed?” he stated.
Mr Oppong Nkrumah also highlighted deteriorating ambulance emergency response times, attributing a portion of the crisis to the lack of a earmarked operational budget for the National Ambulance Service.
“Ambulance response times are getting worse. So what is the reason? And then we are finding out that there’s no dedicated budget for the running of the ambulance service. So this is where now you can make those interventions for development,” he said.
Furthermore, he observed that Ghana presently has no national standard for outpatient department (OPD) wait times, creating a major obstacle to measuring and enhancing hospital efficiency.
“We also just found out that in Ghana, we don’t have a benchmark for what you call OPD response times.
You hear people complaining that I go to the hospital, I sit there for one hour, and nobody has attended to me,” he said.
“This is the committee where we work with the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) and the ministries to set a target for OPD response time, for example, in the area of health, so that now we can measure it year on year, whether it’s getting better or it’s getting worse.”
Mr Oppong Nkrumah concluded that the committee is set to rigorously interrogate the 2025 development report across all sectors, summoning sector ministers and chief executives to public hearings to justify their performance against established national targets.
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
