…as alarm blows on Extortions, Conspiracy and Stealing at Ghana’s Premier Hospital
By Phillip Antoh
More than ten months after a fire gutted the mammography unit at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital’s Radiology Department, newly obtained CCTV footage has blown open questions that management would rather keep buried.
The footage, seen by The New Republic, suggests that a female staff member, a national service personnel detected the blaze a full 30 minutes before the inferno raged out of control.
Yet instead of raising the alarm, she made a phone call, locked the room, handed the keys to security, and drove off with a male doctor.
The fire, which broke out in June 2025, destroyed X-ray machines used for breast examinations and caused extensive damage. Fire extinguishers were present in the room. Had the incident been reported immediately, the blaze could have been contained. It was not.
According to the CCTV record, the service personnel spent half an hour inside the mammography room. During that time, she made a phone call apparently announcing the fire to the person on the other end.
She then locked the door, deposited the keys at the security desk, and left. Security officers at the desk were not alerted. No alarm was raised.
The question haunting investigators is obvious: did she see the fire and choose to walk away? And if so, why?
But the fire may be only the latest act in a longer-running drama of missing equipment and official sleight of hand. Whistleblowers at the facility point to a well-worn script: valuable machines are declared faulty, vanish, and later reappear in private clinics.
In 2020, an X-ray machine reserved for Covid-19 cases became “faulty” overnight after an unauthorised engineer was seen lurking near it.
Declared obsolete, it disappeared from Korle-Bu. Management claimed parts had been removed to fix another machine at the Child Health Department. A whistleblower’s investigation told a different story: the machine had been transferred to a private hospital near Pokuase.
“We sent someone to that hospital for an X-ray,” the whistleblower told The New Republic. “The machine had ‘Korle-Bu’ inscribed on it.”
The matter was reported to the CEO. Six months later, nothing had been done. The whistleblower then petitioned the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO). He asked to be part of the investigations.
He was denied access. EOCO later uncovered a cartel, and an officer who had moved from Korle-Bu to operate the same machine on a part-time basis was transferred to Koforidua.
Fresh information from the department suggests a pattern of organised looting. In just two years, seven printers have disappeared. A mobile X-ray machine from the surgical ICU, along with its printer, has also vanished.
Meanwhile, there are allegations of daily extortion by officers operating the remaining machines. Sources claim they collect between GH¢500 and GH¢1,000 daily from vulnerable patients.
And there is a request for new machines for the mammography department requiring a 10 percent deposit. The fire, some suspect, may have conveniently cleared the way for that purchase.
Top management at Korle-Bu is reportedly sitting on the fire investigation report, trying to conceal both the content and the real motive behind the June 2025 inferno.
Whistleblowers are now calling on the Minister of Health and hospital authorities to release the report, launch a full inquiry into the fire, and investigate the mysterious disappearance of medical equipment.
For now, the footage speaks louder than any official statement. A 30-minute warning. A locked door. Keys handed to security. And a fire that burned while nobody listened.