Editor: I Was A Hired Gun

Amazing confession of an Editor

THE EDITOR OF the ‘banned’ NEW NATIONAL DEMOCRAT newspaper says he served as a medium of destruction through which innocent people were destroyed with highly libellous and defamatory materials that he knew were either not true or he could not prove.

He has also confessed that though he knew that his brand of journalism was “unethical” and that he was “being used as a tool of destruction against innocent people”, he could not turn a blind eye to his disreputable behaviour because the reports he used in the pro-NDC newspaper were sanctioned by his superiors.

Mr Justice Ofori Antwi (real name Michael Dokosi), made these confessions in an eight-paragraph letter of apology and retraction he sent last week to one of his victims and distributed to few friends whom he asked to intercede on his behalf following the withdrawal of his newspaper’s licence by the National Media Commission (NMC), the constitutional body tasked with the registration of newspapers in Ghana. “I must admit that I have never authored any of these malicious stories. This implies that they were written somewhere and imposed on me. However, I am morally and professionally obliged to retract and apologise to you because as Editor I failed to resist the manipulation by people who for reasons best known to them, have an axe to grind with you”, he wrote in a letter to the Director of the Research Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr J. K. Mensah.

Continuing, he said: “My refusal to go to the National Media Commission to substantiate the allegation was not because I do not respect the Commission, but because I could not answer for those who actually wrote and perhaps benefited from the stories.”

The apology comes in the wake of the recent withdrawal of the registration of the New National Democrat newspaper, a virulent pro-NDC underground newspaper, following worrying revelations that the newspaper had used non-existing names and addresses on its registration documents. Even the name of the Editor on the Imprint, the NMC and police investigations later confirmed, was not the publicly-stated Justice Ofori Antwi.

The newspaper consistently failed to appear before the NMC despite several invitations sent to it and despite numerous immodest claims by the Editor on Radio Gold, one of the popular Accra-based radio stations, that he would appear and defend allegations published in his newspaper that the Director of the Research Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr J. K. Mensah, had embezzled $1.5 million belonging to the state, owns a multi-million dollar mansion in the US and had sent two of his daughters to America on extravagant holidays.

The NMC hearings were the result of an official compliant by Mr Mensah, in which he complained of the paper’s consistent “scurrilous press attacks … against members of my family, my personal integrity and professional competence”.

Despite numerous denials of the story, the Editor of the newspaper insisted on the truthfulness of the story and dared the Director of the Research Department to go to court or the NMC to clear his name.

“We are sitting on very sensitive security and intelligence information. If they want us to put them out in the public domain for consumption, then we shall do so”, the Editor wrote in the paper he edits in May this year.

Significantly, when the paper appeared before the NMC, its rep hid his real name till he was properly identified by a member of the Commission who knew him.

The NMC in a letter dated last week, September 16, 2008 and signed by its Chairman, Mr Paul Adu-Gyamfi, dismissed the allegations of impropriety against Mr Mensah as false. It also levelled charges bordering on criminal conduct against the Editor and Publisher of the New National Democrat for violating the newspaper registration law.

Sources say the police last week arrested Messrs Michael Dokosi and Wisdom Yarmenui, Editor and Publisher respectively of the newspaper, on their alleged violation of the newspaper registration law only to also find out that both men interchangeably uses the Justice Ofori Antwi name though Mr Dokosi originally styled himself as the said Justice Ofori Antwi in the declaration made by the publisher on the NMC’s record.

This is the second time an editor of the underground NDC newspaper has denied any hand in a series of publication by the newspaper.

The original National Democrat also saw its former editor, Mr Ebenezer Josiah, denying any hand in the paper’s series of stories a couple of years ago, insisting at the time that the stories were written at former President Rawlings’ Osu Ridge household by the then Rawlings’ Special Aide, Mr. Victor Emmanuel Smith and Mr Dokosi and given to him to use without editing. He subsequently left the paper, which winded up and later re-emerged as the New National Democrat.