Many in Ghana affectionately call him Ghana’s “heartman” in apparent bemusement for what he does for a living — opening the torsos of those with ailing hearts and fixing them.
He is Professor Frimpong Boateng, whose extraordinary service to country, continent and fellowmen has caught the attention of African students studying at Ohio University who voted him for the coveted 2012 edition of the African Heroes Award.
Professor Boateng’s extraordinary expedition to distinction began at the University of Ghana Medical School, where he obtained M.B. and Ch.B. degrees, emerging at the top of his class and also winning the Easmon Prize for being the best student in surgery.
He served as a House Officer, or intern, at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Ghana’s foremost teaching and referral hospital, before moving to the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Ghana’s Garden City, Kumasi, as a medical officer.
Professor Boateng, like many of his contemporaries who sought specialization in the medical field, had to migrate to Europe for lack of facilities for specialization back home. He headed to Boppard in Germany, where he studied at Medizinische Hochschule Hannover (Hannover Medical High School) and specialized in cardiothoracic surgery from 1978 to 1988.
He is a qualified cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon and consultant. He was one of the pioneers of the heart transplantation program in Hannover, where he also taught both undergraduate and postgraduate thorax, cardiothoracic and vascular surgery.
In spite of the lure of economic security and luxury offered by the industrialized nations to professionals of his caliber, Professor Boateng decided to return home after a short stint of practice at the Hannover Medical High School. For many of his compatriots and many other professionals from developing countries, these are not opportunities to be deliberated. They are simply an escape from economic and professional frustrations back home.
The decision to return home at 39 was the singular act that made all the difference in his career. He returned to Ghana with a blueprint to open the first cardiothoracic center, the first of its kind in a region where such facilities are to be sought in Europe, America or South Africa by the rich and the powerful.
Like many other innovators, his journey has not been a smooth one to paradise. He has had a fair share of the frustrations and the disappointments that have forced many Africans to return to countries of their training after failing to find their feet in their own countries after their return.
Indeed, that is where political leadership can make a huge difference in the equation sometimes. This success story cannot be told without the mention of Ghana’s former president, Jerry John Rawlings, who took personal interest in his project and opened an office at the seat of government, where activities involving the establishment of the center were coordinated from.
Professor Boateng has trained myriad students from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and across the African continent, and he can rightly been seen to have affected many lives on the continent and beyond.
He is also the founder of the Ghana Heart Foundation, a charity that offers financial support to offset the cost of surgery for the poor who are unable to afford the procedure at the center he helped founded. He is a member of the Ghana Academy of Sciences and has won many awards including the Millennium Excellence Award in Ghana.
In 2006, he contested the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) presidential slot in the hope of representing his party in Ghana’s 2008 presidential elections but lost. Understandably, he must have appreciated the things that ail his country, like a sick heart, from his surgical lens, hoping he could be given the nod to represent his party and country in order to place his country under his surgical knife to correct its heartbeat. But politics can be more complex than the human heartbeat.
Those who made it to the award list were two of his compatriots, former Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organization (CTO) and an alumnus of the Center for International Studies, Ohio University, Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, and the poet extraordinaire, Professor Kofi Kumado. The others were Professor Eustace Palmer, a Sierra-Leonian literary giant, Dr. Wanjiru Kamau, Christened by the Obama administration as “champion of change” and finalist for 2011 CNN’s Hero, Derreck Kayongo.
Professor Frimpong Boateng, we welcome you to Athens with great pleasure. Your shining example should inspire others to also put their skills at the service of mother Africa. Ohio University says Ayeekooo to you!
Prosper Yao Tsikata is a doctoral student studying health communication.
