Mungo Soggot
It does not take long to grasp why those familiar with Monrovia scoff in disbelief when they hear that Emanuel Shaw II says he checked into the John F Kennedy Medical Centre.
It was once considered to be one of West Africa’s finest medical facilities, but is now the public hospital for the indigent in a town shattered by a savage six-year civil war – a town where most of the buildings have been looted and torched, with only their charred skeletons left standing.
Privately owned fuel generators provide the only power in Monrovia, after looters tore down every strip of electricity cabling. All that is left of the national grid are sabotaged pylons, the mangled limbs of an economic corpse.
The JFK hospital, also gutted in the war, recently acquired one of these prized generators. It operates between eight and 12 hours a day.
But other than a sporadic supply of power, there appears to be little which qualifies it as a sound medical institution. Many of its windows have been removed, and it is starved of both drugs and equipment.
If any of the town’s elite fall ill they fly out of Liberia for treatment. It is not a large elite. Cabinet ministers earn about $30 a month, and policemen $5.
The only thing which was more elusive at the JFK hospital than life-saving medical care this week was the truth. Did Shaw – one of Monrovia’s most prominent inhabitants and the man to whom the South African taxpayer paid more than R3-million last year – check into the hospital on August 20 with an acute case of malaria and typhoid?
“I don’t think a man like Emanuel Shaw would go to the public hospital,” said Isaac Moses, the chief medical officer at the JFK, with a derisory smirk. “Shaw is a well-known person. If he was here, I think I would know.”
During a 10-minute discussion, Moses grew increasingly baffled by my inquiries, finally asking whether I worked for an insurance company. I gave him my Mail & Guardian business card.
I did not show him Shaw’s sick note, purportedly signed, on August 25, by the former chief medical officer at JFK, Peter Coleman. But Moses confirmed that Coleman had become minister of health about five months ago.
During the discussion, Moses asked a colleague seated in his office – a Mr Koffa – whether Shaw had been in the hospital. Koffa said no, and remained silent until the end of our discussion when he said he would check the hospital records to make sure. I decided to wait.
Koffa, who promised about an hour later that he would not be long, said that Shaw would not have stayed in the hospital from August 20 until this week with malaria.
After another hour, Koffa beckoned to me to follow him. He led me into the emergency wing of the hospital, and, as we walked through its smelly, stuffy passages, explained that he was in charge of the wing and “of records”.
He said he wanted to talk to me in his office. He led me through a room in which two patients crouched on the ends of two structures which appeared to be a cross between an antique dentist’s chair and a gynaecological couch.
The seedy, stark ambience gave the structures the unmistakable air of a torturer’s bench. Then into another room, which contained another terrifying examination chair, covered in torn, brown leather. Presumably this was his office.
In a quiet, very serious tone, he explained to me that this was a “teaching hospital, a legal hospital”. He said the hospital could not give out information unless the patient or his doctor granted permission to do so.
He asked whether I had documents to show why I wanted to know about Shaw – presumably a reference to the “Coleman” note. I said I was a journalist and merely wanted to know whether Shaw had been there. He said Shaw had been there, and had been treated by “Peter S Coleman”. I thanked him for his time, and sped out of the muggy maze of passages into the muggier heat of the afternoon.
Fortunately for Shaw, he enjoyed a speedier recovery than the alleged forecast by Coleman. He was seen up and about this week. And on Saturday, August 29 – before he was due to leave the JFK Medical Centre and three weeks before he was due to end his convalescence – he hosted a party at his bungalow in the grounds of Monrovia’s Hotel Africa.