It started as a whisper—now it’s a dirge. Ghana’s hospitals are no longer sanctuaries of healing. They have become quiet cemeteries where the living go to wait for death.
And why?
Because the nurse has walked away.
Yes, the Ghana Registered Nurses’ & Midwives’ Association – GRNMA has declared a strike. And yes, their reasons are not unreasonable: poor conditions, unpaid allowances, broken promises. But what started as a protest has now become a death sentence for the voiceless.
Mortuary workers have sounded the alarm—bodies are flooding in faster than ever before. More corpses in 24 hours than they used to receive in a week. The dead are stacking because the living have been left behind. 
We must ask ourselves: At what cost comes protest?
And more importantly: Who is paying the price?
Not the politicians.
Not the health administrators.
It is the poor. It is the pregnant woman bleeding on a bench in Bolga. It is the taxi driver’s child convulsing in Kasoa.
These are the ones whose lives have become statistics in a union-led war of attrition.
Let me speak plainly:
Nursing is not just a job. It is a sacred covenant.
Just like a police officer can’t refuse to protect, or a soldier can’t abandon the battlefield in the middle of an invasion, a nurse cannot abandon the sick in the heat of their suffering—not without consequence.
How do we explain this to a dying man’s family?
That their brother was left unattended because the very people trained to save him had folded their arms in defiance?
This is not a strike anymore. This is a severe national emergency.
You, dear nurse, may have every right to demand your due.
But do not use the sick and dying as bargaining chips.
Because when a single mother walks into the emergency ward and finds no one to take her blood pressure, she will remember this day not as a day of justice, but as the day Ghana turned its back on her.
Let us not forget:
The child dying from malaria didn’t delay your Allowance.
The man suffering from a stroke didn’t cause inflation.
The orphan in the HIV ward didn’t mismanage the health budget.
And yet they are the ones dying.
The mortuary confirms it.
Ghana is bleeding. Ghana is dying—not from disease, but from abandonment.
Imagine if tomorrow, police officers strike and refuse to respond to armed robbers.
Imagine if fire officers strike as your home burns.
Imagine if teachers strike in the middle of WASSCE.
And now imagine the nurse—our last defence between life and death—choosing to stay home while mothers miscarry on concrete floors.
This cannot be the Ghana we want.
To GRNMA and all striking nurses:
Yes, rise. Yes, speak. Yes, rise. Yes, speak. Yes, march to Parliament with placards—and we, the citizens who know your worth, will stand with you.
But do not strike with silence at the hospital bedside. Do not strike with absence in the ward.
Because when the healer refuses to heal, the sickness spreads—not just in the body, but in the soul of a nation.
Ghana is watching.
The mortuary is counting.
And history will remember.
