Keynote speech by Yaw Nsarkoh at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research Quality Week Celebration

Chair, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

 

Thank you for this very important invitation. I consider it a tremendous honour.

Some nostalgia

There is a sense in which returning to the University of Ghana’s Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research (NMIMR or more simply just ‘Noguchi’) is a homecoming. For, as some of you no doubt know, Legon holds many fond memories of my childhood and youth.

It is now more than four decades ago, though it feels like only yesterday, but I remember your present office premises, way back to when they were being constructed. The area in which it is situated was a thicket of bush that lay between the main campus and the South Legon residential area. To my youthful mind, South Legon was, among other things, the place where Wole Soyinka was to be found.

Soyinka had, as he often has, significantly displeased the incumbent Nigerian military dictator of the time, General Olusegun Obasanjo. Soyinka found Ghana much less repressive and escaped into exile here. I am told that South Legon was his favourite haunt.

 

The period I refer to coincided with Soyinka’s presence. You had an auspicious neighbour in a then-haunted neighbourhood. You may even have played a role in providing him solace as good neighbours; therefore, you perhaps deserve some of the praise for the literary fecundity that was to lead later to a Nobel prize. Congratulations.

My friends and I would slip away from our parents to wander in the bush previously mentioned, to see what was a mega-construction project to our young eyes. When NMIMR was opened in 1979, we came many times to stare at the gleaming white buildings, which by themselves signalled a high-quality aspiration, if not perfection. We had to keep our missions secret, for our parents would have had cardiac arrests if they had known we were wandering through those dense bushes.

A facility dedicated to the work of Dr Hideyo Noguchi, the respected Japanese scientist, was a delightful mystery to us. The young are curious about mystery and wonder, the true ingredients of philosophy. We wondered whether Hideyo Noguchi was related to our Japanese film hero, the Karateka, Bruce Lee. What was the institute being set up for? What was its real work? How would it impact society? Our young minds had no idea beyond that it was a genuinely nice facility,

which thankfully, on my last visit less than a year ago, you seem to have improved. That feat alone earns you the licence to speak about Quality.

Younger ones are probably waiting for me to show my recordings from that era on my social media pages. There are none; this was 1979. It is a tribute to the extent to which the world has changed and to the power of scientific inquiry and application that not many of you can imagine the technological environment of that day. There were no smartphones – indeed, no mobile phones, period. There was no internet, forget about the artificial intelligence of the modern

variation. We had no e-mails, no SMSs, nothing of the sort – the world was a very different place then.

 

I narrate these not just as items of nostalgia, which they are, but also to cement the fact that

Knowledge is the primary productive force in the advancement of society.

Science and Technology have great transformative power when development gives them pride of place.

 

The mystery about this institute has never fully disappeared. Worthier people than I must do more to highlight the significant contributions you have made to society. But I will take this opportunity to highlight, for what it is worth, that without the high-quality work you do here, the dedication and determined efforts from your committed staff, the story of COVID in Ghana and a bit more, would have been akin to carnage. Thank you for the quiet sacrifices you all made.

To the matter at hand

You did not invite me here to share autobiographical notes. There are many more interesting lives than mine if that was your ambition. You have gathered to discuss the all-important subject of quality and sustainability.

It is fitting that we begin our reflections with the words of Hideyo Noguchi himself: “Through devotion to science, I want to contribute to the happiness of mankind.”1

To my mind, that is the whole purpose of the search for Quality in society – the genuine, long-lasting peace, dignity and happiness of humankind.

 

One of the lead thinkers who shaped the Meiji Restoration’s intellectual climate, Yukichi

Fukuzawa stated wisely: “In essence, civilisation means to advance the levels of knowledge and virtue of the people, so that each and every person can be the master of his own affairs in his dealings with society.”2

 

Both men present important scaffolding for how we should see quality. It is a summation of society’s determined search for a better life for all its members – in the deepest, most

meaningful, and holistic understanding of ‘better.’ Quality is not just about financial metrics, nor is it about accreditation and sterile credentialing. In the end, it is about real and tangible improvements in the lives of ordinary people.

 

But you may say, who is he to offer views with such sure-footedness? Therefore, I support my position with an authority you are likely to respect: “Ǫuality control is not just a technique. It must become a way of life. …The most important thing in quality is to create a climate where everyone can speak up.”3

 

These are the words of the respected thinker most associated with what is known as the “fish- bone approach” to quality management, Kaoru Ishikawa. I will resist the temptation to say any more about why a focus on root causes is so important to the systemic and enduring resolution of society’s problems. It may be worthwhile, though, to say that I have quoted a Japanese for the last time in this speech.

 

Humanity stands at a paradox: never before have we been so prosperous in aggregate, yet never before have so many been left behind. A society in which the many are caught in misery, while only the few enjoy the fruits of its collective exertion, is what I call THE PALANQUIN ECONOMY. The 1%, as Joseph Stiglitz4 reminds us, must care about the 99% – not out of charity, but out of

necessity. A society built on “me only” cannot endure. We must build a “we all” or “we first” society, where inclusion is not an afterthought but the foundation.

Quality is the bridge. Not just in products or services, but in governance, institutions, and civic life. True quality demands that we confront root causes, not symptoms. Quality management is a systemic discipline – an insistence on learning from failure, correcting course, and embedding resilience. Above all, it requires true democratic accountability of leaders to the led.

To pursue sustainable quality is to honour science – not just laboratory science, but the broad pursuit of truth through evidence, reason, and reflection. It is to elevate facts over fiction and knowledge over noise.

Knowledge is the primary productive force of our time. Institutions like NMIMR do not merely generate data – they produce insight, shape policy, and safeguard public health. Their role must not only be acknowledged; it must be celebrated, protected, amplified and adequately rewarded.

 

The Ghanaian quality and sustainability dilemma

I will mention just a few dismal realities to sharpen our focus on the fact that, despite the habitual merry-making which characterises the celebratory fests of neoliberal politicians, things are not quite what they should be. Politicians are constantly squabbling about who should get the credit – between NPP and NDC – for some supposed great current state of affairs. It is not always clear to me which one exactly. To be sure, we must commend recent macroeconomic stabilisation, but that must not obscure other hard facts and realities.

 

+ Only 3.8% of our population is above 65, compared to 8–14% in many middle‑income countries. This reflects both a high fertility rate and the dismal reality that far too many Ghanaians do not live long enough – or healthy enough – to enjoy a meaningful retirement.

+ 65% of our adult population is unable to afford the level of nutrition required to keep optimally healthy.

+ 20% of our population lives in extreme poverty.

+ Open defecation stands at circa 18%.

+ We are being ravaged by illegal mining, Galamsey – an existential threat to our entire ecosystem.

 

The tail of woe is endless, but I have not come here to create despair, so I will truncate it. We must keep hope alive; hope springs eternal. James Baldwin taught us to say, with signature

eloquence and craft: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.”5

 

We must survive and then – hopefully – someday thrive. Thriving means improving the collective quality of our lives. Three very distinguished Professors of Economics, two of them winners of the Nobel prize, authored the insightful book, “Mismeasuring our lives.”c In it, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, observed, with tremendous clarity and simplicity: “Ǫuality of life includes the full range of factors that make life worth living, including those that are not captured by monetary measures.”

In Ghana these days, it seems that we are being overwhelmed by the over-financialisaton and over-legalisation of all aspects of our lives. This is a feature of PALANQUIN ECONOMIES everywhere in the world. Governance is stripped of systems thinking and political-economy considerations completely. Nothing seems to matter if it is not stated as a ratio of GDP. This is a dangerous foundation on which to try to build a coherent society.

 

Not everything that counts can be counted in GDP, and not everything that counts in GDP counts in society. For, not everything that counts can be counted.

 

Four main points to NMIMR

There are so many things about our society I would love to touch on, but we will choose brutally today, to enable focus. Focus, the ability to prioritise, is a core feature of high-quality cultures – especially when done with systems thinking on a whole-process basis.

 

Our forebears would say with great acuity: the moon does not take one day to cross the town; it takes some time for it to develop into the full moon. “Ɔsra-ni nfa da baako ntwa man mu.”

 

I have chosen four points to make about how NMIMR can accelerate its role in the civic

awakening, indeed, quality revolution, that Ghana so desperately needs – if the future is to be significantly better than the present. The word ‘accelerate’ is used advisedly, for you are already playing a key role in this regard. A role for which you do not always get enough support, acknowledgement, or credit, as an institute or team, in our society. This must change.

 

My focus is somewhat external, because it is not my place to tell you what to do about your institution, an institute I hardly know, though your director was my esteemed classmate, and I have other friends here. Your director must be panicking that I am about to tell you about her youth. I have nothing to say beyond that she was an exemplary university student, and that my mates in the School of Engineering, where I was, produced a fine gentleman for her.

Perhaps that is my real qualification for speaking to you about quality, I was part of producing a very high-quality husband for your director.

 

The proverb, “Obi nnto Anansesɛm nkyerɛ Ntikuma,” guides me in many of my endeavours. People know their spaces better than I do, it is not for me to meddle.

 

Therefore, I will merely make four suggestions that may be useful for you:

 

+ Model and exemplify excellence (in our society which is threatened by anomie conditions).

 

+ Exemplify and advocate a culture of science and facts (in a country mired in dysfunctional superstition).

 

+ Champion civic education to deepen society-wide literacy (and appreciation) of the role of science in national development.

 

+ Be organic intellectuals who work systemically and focus on providing solutions that secure the long term health of society.

++Whatever else you do, HAVE FUN. Make NMIMR a wonderful place to work.

 

Mercifully, since I committed to speak for my allotted time and no more, after these four things – if you tolerate me till then, I will be done. I shall say no more. So, fasten your seat belts and let us proceed – through the valleys of the shadows of acceleration and modernisation.

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  Model and exemplify excellence

 

Understandably, you think of big, sophisticated, and complex things when you first hear this. But those who know and understand how to build and sustain high-quality cultures first focus on getting the fundamentals in place. Those who can avoid broken windows and unpainted walls have built some of the most functional societies.

 

As stated earlier, since boyhood, your premises – clean and green – have fascinated me, in a country that, even in 2026, cannot sustainably manage garbage in its cities. This should be a national embarrassment of the most egregious kind, especially to our educated elites – but is it?

 

Or country broke or country no broke we dey inside? We should all cry our own cry – Obiara bɛgye ne blɛdi fool afe yi.

 

Certainly, excel in the big things, but do small things well. Become the place people talk about when they look to see how organically functioning, high-quality societies can look. Spotlessly clean, time-conscious, respectful of everyone, focused on customer service with systemic arrangements. And here, there should be no hierarchy-based arbitrariness in leadership. Put power in an institutional cage. If you can become the reference point in this, in addition to all else you already are, you would be making a great contribution to the advancement of our society.

 

The sometimes controversial but always no-nonsense Dr Mahathir Bin Mohamad, as a young man, spoke the truth when he uttered these uncompromising and unyielding words: “When there is no awareness of time, there can be no planning, and work is never reliable. … A community which is not conscious of time must be regarded as a very

backward society. It can never achieve anything on its own, and it can never be expected to advance and catch up with superior time-conscious civilisations.”7

He wrote these words fifty-six years ago, in 1970, but they are eternally true, and even more importantly, very relevant to us in Ghana today. There is no chance of building a high-quality civilisation if we do not improve in this area.

It is leadership that must exemplify this most, and the senior people from the government over here today must kindly take this message back to their colleagues. They need to commit to waging a revolution to improve in this regard.

 

It is true, if we are to be sincere, that time consciousness cannot be reduced to just a matter of individual discipline. Our systems must improve. You cannot have a culture of timeliness when your public transportation is unsystematic, for example. Or when every politician, chief, or priest seems to think they have a licence to keep you waiting for

hours, even if they gave you the time for an appointment. We cannot allow the situation where just any pastor, prophet, chaplain or Rasputin can hold up traffic for six plus hours, with no law enforcement consequences. If we allow this sort of impunity, to be sure, even the most diligent cannot keep time.

 

Because we are human, sometimes, even the most well-intended will disappoint. These exceptions are not my concern. It is the disorderliness that has been normalised in mainstream culture, especially for so-called big people, who think they have divine

rights to be late and keep everyone waiting, that I am calling attention to. Let us move on to the next point before things get too uncomfortable here.

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  Exemplify and advocate a culture of science and facts

You need look no further than many of the media debates in our country – social or orthodox media – to realise that we have been hit by a pandemic of stark disregard for diligently researched facts. Our media environment, but also lots of discourse

elsewhere, is saturated by reckless punditry – sometimes involving the most educated in our society. So many people turn up to participate in discourse that requires solid expertise and preparation, equipped with neither.

 

Hearsay, guesswork, rumours, gossip, myths, suppositions, speculation, unreasonable assumptions, half-truths, distortions and outright superstition, sometimes even near hallucinations, are then passed on to unsuspecting audiences as reasonable

conclusions by those who should know much better. This is simply unacceptable. Much of this dysfunction is fuelled by malice generated in our out-of-control climate of political polarisation.

 

As if this is not enough, we are now faced with the turbulent climate of uncontrolled prophecies by charlatans toying with the vulnerabilities of many of our compatriots. They try to predict outcomes of political contests, sometimes even when prominent personalities are scheduled to die. These charlatan prophets and mystics are, perhaps, the vilest offenders of all, and they are dangerous miscreants. Their menace must be stopped by any lawful means necessary, with firmness and resolve.

 

You cannot build a high-quality civilisation with such attitudes to the truth and facts. You, as researchers and scientists of great pedigree, need no tuition on this matter from me. Watching this descent into the abyss of the era of the clueless pundit, one remembers the penetratingly sarcastic words of Isaiah Berlin, the distinguished

philosopher, when he described attitudes to Karl Marx’s book, Das Kapital: “It has been blindly worshipped, and blindly hated, by millions who have not read a line of it, or have read without understanding…”8

 

I suspect many Ghanaians can identify with that. In arguing the need for a high-quality culture that SEEKS TRUTH FROM FACTS, the great Deng Xiaoping remarked: “We must seek truth from facts, proceed from reality in everything, and integrate theory with

practice.”S

Mangana Yamutu! We must move on, as I have every intention not to exceed my allotted time.

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  Champion civic education to deepen society-wide literacy (and appreciation) of the role of science in national development

 

In my considered view, Professor Kwame Gyekye10 – a philosopher’s philosopher – has still not been sufficiently celebrated by our boorish society. His achievements and contributions to the development of African philosophy deserve much more recognition. He was a relatively quiet man. I remember seeing him moving around this university, completely shorn of any airs about his tremendous scholarly

achievements. He taught us, through his lectures and his writing, that no society can

achieve meaningful development without cultivating a scientific culture -one that values critical inquiry, empirical reasoning, and the systematic pursuit of knowledge.

 

You, as researchers, need no goading on this. But you must broaden your strategies for bringing this realisation to the public. Frantz Fanon, a medical researcher like you, once

rightly observed that, “Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.”11

 

I am a professionally amphibious – if not ambiguous – creature. I belong to both the

worlds of applied natural sciences (as an engineer) and the applied social sciences (as a marketer, general manager, professional coach, and governance practitioner).

 

Researchers and applied scientists can, in fact, learn a great deal from marketers. However much marketers may be blamed for the sins of mindless consumerism, skills in systematic development of communication mixes are essential capabilities in the modern world. In preparing this speech, it hit me how little so many of my colleagues in business, and my compatriots in general, know about the work you do. Without you, I say again, we would not have survived the COVID pandemic, and the EBOLA scare would have been much worse. But who knows or even cares that you do all this?

 

NMIMR must, I dare to suggest, be more aggressive about media partnerships and partnerships in general, that help it to build the needed support and goodwill in society. This is not about hubristic, pompous, and arrogant showing off. It is about understanding how the real world works – especially the business world. There are many who would love to support your excellent work, but you must court them systematically. There is not enough time to describe further what should be done, so for now, I will just say science in Ghana, perhaps even all academia, needs more positive marketing. Let us speak some more after this, you can make us all, and this society even more broadly, much more literate; so, do it.

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  Be organic intellectuals who work systemically and focus on providing solutions that secure the long term health of society.

 

I again salute your work, emblematic examples of this offered by the relentless programmes you put in place to save, perhaps, a not-so-deserving public, from what could have been much worse. If ‘not so deserving’ sounds rather harsh and cynical it is because Galamsey

truly enrages me.

 

How could so many of us, millions of us indeed, have watched and tolerated such wanton destruction and craven irresponsibility at all levels of society, while this scale of destruction was done to our ecosystem? Yet it continues to ravage our forests, our water bodies, our communities, our collective futures – party come, party go – with assured impunity. Despite the loud but perfunctory rhetoric of politicians of every hue and stripe, we simply have not made enough progress on this matter. We all have roles to play here.

 

The philosopher, Antonio Gramsci noted from his engaged writings, as he was being destroyed in prison by the Italian Fascist machinery, on Mussolini’s orders to shut down his influential brain: “The organic intellectuals are the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social group.”12

 

Fate and fortune have conspired to place you with a public health mission and mandate. Our society needs you to be part of this vanguard. To function competently in this sphere, as organic intellectuals, you must stay engaged with all classes of our society – presidents, professors, politicians, potentates, priests, pilots, plumbers, peasants, even prostitutes. It will be such a shame if you collapsed into an elite group of intellectually incestuous academics and researchers that transactionally focus on career progress, only by quoting each other’s regurgitated work while contributing nothing original to knowledge. I know you will not.

 

It is only with a determination to master the disciplinary foundations at world-class levels, and also, the capabilities to interpret these, with suitable adaptations to our own context (on an interdisciplinary basis), that you will exemplify how Africa can contribute steadily and seriously to global thought leadership. And there is no reason you should not aspire to do this. Best wishes.

 

CONCLUSION – HAVE FUN WHILE YOU ARE AT IT.

Initially, it was my intention to spend considerable time talking about why you must make your workplace a wonderful place to work. We spend so much time at work in our modern reality that it would be such a shame if work is not fun. We need to create a positive and uplifting climate to maintain peak motivation and optimal mental health. If we are to be honest, this has not always received the priority strategic focus it should have. The dignity of labour, all labour, is paramount in high-quality cultures.

 

But I have known your Institutional Quality Manager since university. If most of you are anything like her, then perhaps you are already having too much fun in this place. Therefore, I will leave it at that and conclude. .·^,´ ●˙› Long live Noguchi’s Mrs Susan Adu-Amankwah! Agorɔ no aduru simigwado!

I have tried to make the point that quality is a civilisational quest. It is meaningless if pursued as anything else. Especially, if it is pursued as some commoditised and mechanistic set of random initiatives that are disconnected from the larger society. Just so you can pile on accreditation points.

I have noted that this is an Institute with a great pedigree that has already achieved much that we can all be immensely proud of. Now is the time to create an even greater future.

 

In that effort, I named four things you could do more of:

 

+ Model and exemplify excellence.

+ Exemplify and advocate a culture of science and facts.

+ Champion civic education to deepen society-wide literacy (and appreciation) of the role of science in national development.

+ Be organic intellectuals who work systemically and focus on providing solutions that secure the long-term health of society.

 

Quality is life, and life only matters when it has quality! All that remains now is to wish you the absolute best and then take my seat. But before I do so, we started with memories of Soyinka, so I will end with his words – from his “Death and the King’s Horseman:”13

 

“Life is honour. It ends when honour ends.”

 

I wish you a tremendously honourable future. Thank you.

REFERENCES

 

1. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. The Lifetime of Dr. Hideyo Noguchi. Tokyo: Cabinet Office, 2025. https://www.cao.go.jp/noguchisho/english/about/lifetimedrnoguchi.html.

 

1. Fukuzawa, Yukichi. An Encouragement of Learning. Translated by David A. Dilworth and Umeyo Hirano. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

 

1. Ishikawa, Kaoru. What Is Total Ǫuality Control? The Japanese Way. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985.

 

1. Stiglitz, Joseph E. The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. New York: W. W. Norton C Company, 2012.

 

1. James Baldwin. As Much Truth As One Can Bear. The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962.

 

1. Stiglitz, Joseph E., Amartya Sen, and Jean‑Paul Fitoussi. Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up. New York: The New Press, 2010.
2. Mahathir bin Mohamad. The Malay Dilemma. Singapore: Asia Pacific Press, 1970.

 

1. Berlin, Isaiah. Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 1963.

 

1. Deng, Xiaoping. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, 1S82–1SS2. Volume III. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994.

 

1. Gyekye, Kwame. Culture, Religion, and the Pursuit of Science: The African Experience. In Philosophy, Culture, and Vision: African Perspectives, edited by Helen Lauer, 25–44. Accra: Sub‑Saharan Publishers, 2007.

 

1. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

 

1. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992–2007.

 

1. Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Methuen, 1975.

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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.