"The decision to ban multi-media from all state functions by government is backward, ancient, primitive and an unprecedented achievement!!!" - Kweku Baako (Good Morning Ghana, Metro-TV. 22/3/12)
?"in 2008 under the erstwhile New Patriotic Party, Radio Gold, an Accra based FM station was highly critical of the government and yet no such decision was taken"- Dr.Niyi Alabi (myjoyonline, 22/3/12).That's the difference between a pragmatic "gentle giant" and a "fictitious impotent saint".
Now, there is this southern Sudanese axiom that says: "you can sharpen an axe enough to be able to cut a tree but you can never sharpen an axe to be able to barber human hair”. Effectively, the NDC people have the skill to win elections through massive rigging but when it comes to the intellect to effectively govern, they have proven to be UNPRECEDENTEDLY deficient.
The P(NDC), of which Atta-Mills was an integral part, propounded lofty ideals of accountability, probity, integrity and social justice, upon which many responsible and noble citizens of our dear nation, who were also the sole bread winners for their families, were simply tied to the stakes and shot like armed robbers for legally accessing bank loans. Many others simply disappeared into thin air without trace up to date. At the end of it all, the good people of this nation were bequeathed with a legacy of HIPC.
The culture of silence
Now, what has really been imprinted on the minds of most Ghanaians who lived to that era has always been this issue of press freedom, or better still, “the culture of silence”. Only GBC was in existence at the time and whatever came from that outfit by way of news, was taken as the gospel. That state of affairs of our nation’s media actually served as a catalyst for military adventurists to engage in all sorts of subversive acts against the state, under the cloak of seeking to redeem the nation from corrupt leaders. In the end, those military adventurists ended being consumed by their own selfish seeds of reckless adventurism.
The advent of ‘radio eye’
That situation went on till the nation woke up one fine morning to the sound of “radio eye” which happened to be the handy of work of the one and only good-old Dr.Charles Wereko-Brobbey (Tarzan).the life of that radio station was very much short lived since it was raided and all the equipments being used to carry out its activities were simply yanked off their resting places and recklessly bundled into waiting military vehicles and taken to an unknown destination. I remember Dr. Brobbey tried his possible best to retrieve his equipments through the law courts but little did he know that in the court of old-layer chickens, a cockroach can never have a fair justice. He tried all the legal acrobatics ever known in history but all to no avail since he was simply swimming the waves. In the end, he abandoned the fight, went home dejected, licked his deep wounds and counted his loss.
Atta-Mills’ P(NDC) baggage
So, when Atta-Mills decided to succeed Rawlings by contesting on the ticket of NDC for the 2000 elections, it was very easy for the opposition at the time to use all those baggage from the 19years of P(NDC) against him. This again worked against him in 2004 but Ghanaians fell for the mountain of NDC lies in 2008 and voted for Atta-Mills. And I guess he was successful as a result of very conscious efforts made by the NDC campaign strategists to clean the image of Atta-Mills and give him a pretentious image of piety.
The birth of a ‘new’ NDC
This false representation of Atta-Mills as a son of God and NDC as a new-born baby with all its past evils completely purged off it, culminated at the national theatre when the “new NDC” was out-doored in a grand-style amidst much razzmatazz.
They were able to marshal a few ‘chop chop’ pastors to give the accession a resemblance of godliness with their ‘kuluulu’ prophesies about how Atta-Mills had specially been ordained by the almighty God and sent straight from heaven to deliver Ghanaians from chronic socio-economic quagmire and raise our impoverished standard of living to that of America.
And since human beings are endowed with this affinity of always yearning for more, Ghanaians decided to reject a government that had provided them with NHIS, MMT, NYEP, LEAP, CAPITATION GRANT, SCHOOL FEEDING, FREE NATAL CARE and so on, and rather go for a political novice whose only claim to fame has always been his artfully false representation of himself as a saint.
As for those other promises made in 2008 by Atta-Mills-led ndc, I will need a gargantuan pen and unprecedented volume of paper to enable me chronicle them.
6 Invasion of people’s privacy
Apparently, some equipment were brought into the country with which people’s private phone conversations were hacked into and recorded for broadcast on Radio Gold. Myself and other very close associates of mine were victims of that pure act of illegality by Raymond Archer and his cabal so I know exactly what I’m talking about here. This resulted in all members of NPP actually switching from mobile network they were using because we became very much suspicious of that particular network provider.
Ironically, those at the fore-front fighting with every sinew in their now heavily over-bloated bodies and jumping up-and-down like male squirrels on heat, over alleged bias treated meted out to them by multi-media.
These same Okudzeto-Ablakwa and James Agyenim-Boateng made the studios of ‘asempa fm’ their permanent deputy ministerial office where they spent countless hours every afternoon, purposely to denigrate the image of Nana Addo.the likes of Otokunor, Kojo Twum-Boafo and an abject ignoramus as Alhaji Bature were always handy to put the icing on insulting pasteries, when NPP decided not to appear on Bobie Ansah’s ‘ekosii sen’ programme.
A saint with a demonic mouth-piece Dr Michael Bokor, in an article on ‘myjoyonline’, on 25th March 2012, said “it is clear that the government’s communication team has flopped and opened the government up for frontal attack from its opponents and other segments of the populace with critical minds seeking to query government’s stewardship on all fronts.
The government seems ill-prepared to be confronted with such quizzes; hence, its hasty decision to avoid the scrutiny, especially in the open discussions that go on under the auspices of the Multimedia Group and other news media. The claim of bias is just a sorry excuse to be dismissed with the contempt it deserves. It is undeniable that the government has very huge credibility problems in every sense.
It seems political immaturity, over-blown self-confidence, and many other factors have combined to make it extremely difficult for the government to manage its communication tasks effectively.
How many times haven’t we complained about the shoddy manner in which Koku Anyidoho and the President’s entire Communication Directorate have been managing the communication aspects of governance? Yet, nothing has been done to either revamp that Directorate or to look for better quality material with the requisite acumen to do the tasks responsibly.
The government’s own Communication Team is nothing but a hollow pipe that channels out nothing but puerile and irritating rejoinders to viewpoints raised by the opposition. Everything they do is reactive. Even when they attempt to be proactive, they mess up, contradicting each other. Whoever made that decision is not only short-sighted but is also unfit to be in government”.
Justice Abeeku Newton-Offei
E-mail: justnoff@yahoo.com
