GJA Seminar Gives Way to Soccer Match

Ghanaians' deep love for soccer was on display on Saturday when a seminar had to be temporarily suspended in order for participants to be able to watch a football match.

So ardent was the desire, and so deep the love for the game that the majority of participants attending a three-day seminar organized by the Ghana Journalists Association, (GJA) opted to postpone proceedings for a few hours in order to enable them watch the world cup quarter finals match between Senegal and Turkey.

The three day seminar organized by the GJA and IBIS, a Danish NGO, is the second stage of a framework set up in anticipation of the work of the national reconciliation commission; it is primarily aimed at sensitizing media practitioners and publishers on the important role the media has to play in the process of national reconciliation.

According to Mrs. Afenyi-Dadzie, President of the GJA, the leadership of the association is of the view that the effective management or mismanagement of the reconciliation process is paramount to the political stability of the nation, also the way and manner the process is managed and reported will definitely have an impact on our international image.

She added that ever since the call for the nation to be brought into a state of harmony for the sake of peaceful co-existence, the passing of the national reconciliation act has been the most important step taken to concretize the process.

Mrs.Afenyi-Dadzie stressed the fact that, experiences from other countries indicate that a reconciliation process is worth embarking on but it is never an easy task, especially if formalities and modalities for its implementation are not well thought of, and the citizenry made to accept the terms of the process.

To buttress this view, a resource person, Professor Jo Ellen Fair, of the university of Wisconsin-Madison, told participants that the principle underlying reconciliation is catharsis or healing and this idea is one that must be examined by all countries in transition from authoritarianism, as to whether to establish reconciliation processes or not.

According to her the degree to which commissions are successful or not in fulfilling their mandates depend on a number of factors, for example sufficient budgets and staffing, because without these they cannot operate effectively, she cited the case of Chad which had to scale down its investigative activities and could not publicize its findings due to the above reasons.