Where to House the Media Development Fund

Where to House the Media Development Fund: A Humble Suggestion

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

The earmarking of GH¢1 million for the establishment of a Media Development Fund (MDF), in the 2012 Budgetary Statement just released by the government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), is a laudable idea that is long overdue (See “It’s Free….It’s Like a Scholarship – Okudzeto-Ablakwa” GhanaVillage.com 11/17/11). The potential problem that needs to be promptly resolved, however, if the fund is to be credibly and objectively administered, is to house this “seed money” in a reputable public institution with a readily recognizable capacity to administer the same.

On the foregoing score, three institutions readily come to mind, namely, the National Media Commission (NMC), the University of Ghana’s School of Mass Communication (UG-Mass Comm.) and the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), some of whose key operatives appear to have initially suggested the establishment of a Media Development Fund to Vice-President John Dramani Mahama. So far, the government has only stated its intention of establishing a Board of Trustees to administer disbursements from the MDF.

The most eligible of the three suggested potential administrators of the MDF appears to be the University of Ghana’s School of Mass Communication, for the simple reason that this is where the most brilliant of the nation’s media experts and operatives are trained. And so whatever Board of Trustees the government ultimately sets up could proactively collaborate with the Legon journalism school to administer the fund. Of course, the MDF could also be housed at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), if the latter institution demonstrates its capacity for doing so. The MDF could even be named after a legendary Ghanaian journalist or media operative.

The National Media Commission (NMC) may not be an ideal candidate for housing the MDF principally because, recently, the NMC has come up for a lot of quite legitimate public criticism, including its rather lurid attempt to circumvent the democratic principle of equal employment opportunity by nominating one of its own key operatives for the post of Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC). In the process, the NMC considerably damaged its credibility with the greater Ghanaian public, a damage that will take quite awhile to repair.

The Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) also appears to be a viable housing candidate for the MDF, because of its longstanding annual ritual of recognizing the most outstanding members of the trade. But, perhaps, what is most significant here is for the MDF to greatly expand its monetary resources, which is why I have elected to call it “a seed fund.” What this means is that active efforts ought to be made to solicit voluntary and charitable contributions from private and corporate entrepreneurs, and concerned members of the general public at large. A certain percentage of the annual dues from the membership of the GJA could also be invested in the MDF.

As usual, Deputy Information Minister Okudzeto-Ablakwa was up to his propagandistic frivolity again, as evinced by the following remarks: “Government has decided that beginning next year, 2012, they will endeavor to equip journalism as a profession. We need to appreciate the fact that the media is doing well and for that matter needs to be helped…. Now that we have discovered oil, it is important to train [a] core [group of] journalists that can specialize in the oil sector. We need to build the capacity of journalists. So if you are a journalist and you want to further your education or you want a scholarship to specialize in a certain area, you can apply to the board of trustee [of the MDF].”

Actually, what needs to be done pronto is for our leading national journalism schools and institutions to critically and radically diversify their curricula, in order to ensure the training of specialists in the various avenues of our political – or national – economy. Thus after their basic curricular orientation, individual journalism students could specialize in such areas of reportage as business, healthcare, politics and culture, engineering, science and technology, the environment and investigative journalism, among a host of other sub-genres and sub-disciplines.

What the foregoing means is that rather than establishing this largely cosmetic Media Development Fund, the government ought to begin to heavily invest in the educational sector as a whole, particularly in the language arts and the sciences, by way of a positive spillover into the media sector. Needless to say, the quality of Ghanaian journalism pretty much reflects the state and quality of our academic culture. The kind of ad hoc and amateurish approach to public policy that is disturbingly exemplified by Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s above-quoted remarks cannot take Ghana and Ghanaians very far. In essence, you don’t wait until there is a discovery of oil before you start training journalists for this vital sector of the national economy.

Rather, you think ahead in terms of practical possibilities and then you strategize to take advantage of such not altogether accidental discoveries. For the oil sector is the one area of our national economy that a foresighted leader would not want to be dominated by foreigners, both at the entrepreneurial and media levels.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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