Media must focus on relevant issues - Nunoo-Mensah

The National Security Adviser, Brigadier General (rtd) Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, has urged the media to focus more on relevant social issues instead of providing platform for unending political arguments.

He said as a country, “we must be more serious and assertive on how to improve the economy in order to provide jobs for the teeming unemployed youth and better the lots of the people.”


He, therefore, entreated Ghanaians to be innovative and take a cue from the Asian Tigers like Japan, China, Malaysia and Indonesia, which are powerful nations in terms of economic advancement.


“We should not sit aloof waiting for manna to fall from heaven and stop arguing about politics all day as if there is nothing else to do or else we shall continue wallowing in poverty”, he advised.


Brig. Gen. Nunoo-Mensah, expressed these sentiments when he chaired the 48th Speech and Prize-Giving Day of Archbishop Porter Girls’ Senior High School in Takoradi, over the weekend.


The event, under the theme “Harnessing the Innate Potential of the Girl Child for Positive National Development: Our Concern", also marked the “Family Day” for the school, which enabled families whose wards are in the school to interact with them.


Brig. Gen. Nunoo-Mensah entreated Ghanaians to stop complaining all the time about the economy, and rather urged the people to think about what they could do to improve the economy for the betterment of the entire citizenry.

Touching on the importance of education, the National Security Adviser noted that the future of the country’s development depended largely on providing quality education for all children-of-school-going age, since they are the future leaders.


He advocated for a massive improvement in the educational infrastructure by the government, corporate bodies and philanthropists, saying, the government alone cannot shoulder all the responsibility in the education sector.


He said although he spent most of his adult life in the military, he had passion for education, hence he used portion of his resources to put up educational facilities for deprived communities in the country, and urged the well-to-do in society to do same.


The Headmistress of the school, Miss Louisa Constance Aggrey, said the school continues to record the best results in the West African Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) in the Western Region.


She said out of 751 candidates presented for the 2013 WASSCE, 579 had quality passes in all the eight subjects, 163 passed in seven subjects while two passed in six subjects.


She said a comparative analysis of the third and fourth year candidates’ results in the WASSCE showed that, the fourth year batch generally performed much better than the third year’s.

However, she said the best candidate for the school was a third year candidate in the person of Miss Marian Queenly Gad, who had eight “As”, and currently studying Optometry at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi.


Touching on some challenges confronting the school, Miss Aggrey, expressed worry over the increasing student population, which currently stands at 1,630, thus putting pressure on the few educational and accommodation facilities there.


She, therefore, made a passionate appeal to the government, to as a matter of urgency, complete the GETfund projects in the school, which had stalled, to ensure conducive teaching and learning environment, for both teachers and students.


The headmistress commended both the teaching and non-teaching staff for their untiring efforts to maintain the high standards set by the founding fathers of the school and their predecessors.