The Agyenim Boateng Code, Who Loses?

(Part I)

It's now official. The government of Ghana has boycotted the powerful Joy FM and its half a dozen affiliates across the country. Announcing its decision on another Accra-based private radio station on Monday, March 18, 2012, a junior minister, James Agyenim Boateng said government had come to the firm and settled conclusion to boycott the entire programming of the Multimedia Group Limited upon careful thought.

Mr Boateng went on, "they have showed persistent and clear bias against the government. We are doing fine as a government and they are also doing fine as a radio station".

Then later on Wednesday, the junior minister who was very key in using his former employer's limited but powerful radio show on Radio Gold to propagate the National Democratic Congress (NDC's) agenda in opposition escalated his Joy FM ban to a frightening level.

He says all other government departments and agencies were also being mandated not to transact any business with the Joy FM family. That alert meant that government agencies and parastatal organisations shall also cease their advertisements with the radio station and its affiliates.

He has also threatened that all assigns from the radio station who attend an invites-only government events be treated as "gate crashers".

The Multimedia Group, particularly its flagship Accra-based English-only programming radio station, Joy FM has become synonymous with the 'gospel' when it comes to radio in Ghana. Its reach is expanding by the day and they have carved a niche for themselves as the most credible if the most powerful radio station in the country. This does not mean that as a human organisation, certain individuals on the station might not try to push parochial interests, which might manifest in its programming content.

In fact, journalism 101 teaches us that news must be value free, fair, balanced, if objective. But in its quest to educate, inform and entertain, the trade has often tended to, particularly in developing economies like ours, create tension and in extreme cases hate, resulting in atrocious wars--Rwanda a test case. Fairness does also not mean that practitioners cannot support individuals and organizations with their powerful media. That is why in the USA for example, a candidate who has the largest endorsements from media corps is not unlikely to win either a presidential primary or the main election itself this however does not take away professionalism from the USA media groups.

Joy FM is very powerful. This was the radio station on which the now party chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Jake Otanka Obetsebi Lamptey, who was then party campaign manager called the 2004 presidential polls in favour of President Kufuor. I mean, Jake whose late father was in-famed as an expert bomb thrower or what George Walker Bush of modern day politics would prefer calling a terrorist, declared Kufuor president on Joy FM in 2004.

It was the same radio station, which gave vent and credibility to views of people like Alex Segbefia and many of the not too experienced folks who are today in charge of the golden fleece. In fact, a worker with that station once told of how a certain very powerful NDC member who now heads a certain regional grouping used to beg her just to put them on air--the same man has since their electoral victory in 2008 refused to answer phone calls from the Joy FM journalist.

Truth be told, stopping all government agencies and state-owned companies from advertising on Joy FM will hurt the latter. Advertising revenues will shrink as the biggest spender in economy is the government. In case we don't know, the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SNNIT) has shares in at least 60 percent of Ghana's 28 commercial banks (due to the mergers and acquisitions, commercial banks have shrunk to 26). The Boateng fiat therefore means all those banks in which government has a stake, particularly those not listed o the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) may no longer advertise with them.

So Joy FM may lose some revenues for the duration of the Boateng code. But how long will this hurt Joy FM and its host of affiliates? Indeed, some of these government agencies might be bound by legal contracts, which might have some ominous consequences should these contracts be capriciously aborted. Almost all advertising campaigns are sealed with legal agreements and exit clauses most often place legal burdens on advertisers. So who loses most here?

Let's go back to the eight years of Kufuor's rule. Radio Gold was very hostile to everything NPP, maybe largely as a result of its ownership (if it's true that ownership actually determines media content and programming). Rupert Murdoch and his Sky and Fox groups are perceived to dwell a lot on sensationalism, which many an expert claim culminated in the phone hacking scandals, which when discovered not only led to a closure of the once almighty News of the World tabloid newspaper, but has also brought a huge dent in the Murdoch empire. The phone hacking is believed to have pushed content to help boost viewerships to possibly balloon ad revenues.

That is why it is believed that radio and media programming at large is about impression management. And any organisation, which expects to derive the optimum mileage from any media output must respond while the news is still hot. Why do you think the NPP introduced serial callers and even went a step further to constitute the Coffee Shop Mafia? It was to cover its back and actually set the agenda for the entire nation, ala manage the impressions people formed about the narco-kleptocracy they were benignly nursing in the land.

Since the inception of the 1992 Constitution and the lifting of the ban on private broadcasting, the NPP has deliberately managed to position itself as a more private media friendly party in the country. NDC has however portrayed itself as very hostile to the private media this is despite the fact that it was the very NDC government which introduced media pluralism in the country, albeit through persistent pressure from civil society.

Why boycott Joy FM in this hot election year? Does it make the government look more organised or confused? At least, we have heard both the NDC national women's organiser and the Volta Regional Minister belatedly admit that the government's communications team was immature. And I guess immaturity here is not in reference to age--but rather to depth of knowledge and a clear display of cutting edge organisational capability, which is translated into an organised dissemination of information on government policy and social policy delivery.

This is a government, which when appointing its first information minister, decided to chose Zita Okaikoi, a never-practiced law graduate who operated a bush canteen as its first choice cabinet level information minister. The gaffes were awesome. Government information machinery for the period was so jaundiced and the rest is history. The pretty Zita was replaced with old school John Akolgo Tia, who was touted as a journalist but ended up as one of the most disastrous choices ever made by this government. As for the two deputies, they have lived up to the billing, given the fact that they are largely inexperienced.

The same government went to sleep and allowed its avowed critic and NPP ambassador Kabral Blay Amihere to be appointed chair of the National Media Commission (NMC) who then ensured that many NPP sympathisers got appointed to the boards of public media organisations to help prosecute a certain interest. Government then started complaining that, oh, the NMC and the public press was not friendly to government appointees and were not offering the needed coverage on government events and projects--there is a tool called lobbying, which could have led to a watering down of a one-party support dominance, if any sort was there, on the media commission. Did government utilise this tool? To be continued….

Source: Kojo Owusu-Mbire

Email: owusumbire@gmail.com