TALKING DRUM: Why the GJA must go beyond organizing awards!

The GJA is offering this car to the overall winner

Once making a walk pass the premises of the Ghana International Press Center (GiPC) together with a friend, we spotted something spectacular.

At the forecourt of the GiPC sat two cars on two separate wooden platforms. Curious to know why such cars would be showcased at the premises occupied by the Ghana Journalists Association, we drew near.

On the cars were written: “Journalist of the Year 2015,” and “GJA Best Financial Reporter of the Year 2015” respectively.

For many critics of the GJA Awards, this has been one thing that is long overdue. Indeed, such critics see no reasoning in giving journalists laptops and television sets as their take home prizes.

In making their argument cogent, they would cite the example of most beauty pageants giving out cars and other valuables to winners. So, for these critics, a journalist who would have to trek the mountains and the hinterlands being given a car is not only important but needful. 

I must therefore, first, commend the sponsors of both cars that will go to lucky persons who will win the GJA journalist of the year, and the GJA Best Financial Reporter of the Year awards. More so, the Ghana Journalists Association also needs to be commended for, finally, listening to the voice of the people.

This goes to the journalist who excelled in financial reporting

Tonight, media practitioners, friends of the media and Ghanaians at large will either be at the Banquet Hall of the State House or sit at home to watch the GJA awards unfold.   

The GJA Awards, though colourful, I think, needs massive improvement this time round. I look forward to seeing the GJA showing Ghanaians the [three] finalists selected for every category of the awards. As well, the works of such journalists (be it TV, radio, print or online) must be projected on a screen for some few minutes for Ghanaians to appreciate it rather than merely announcing the winners.

After all, is the night not to celebrate journalists who forfeit their leisure and pleasure to work seven days a week? Often, prolong musical performances and speeches take the shine of the awards. 

In America, the coveted Pulitzer Prize Awards for journalists is one award scheme a journalist would not miss. 

Indeed, aside the Pulitzer being open about how its judges select the winners for all the categories of the awards, it as well offers the outside world the opportunity to freely access the works of all the award-winning journalists. 

Then a freelancer, I once wrote on Radio Ghana’s News Commentary suggesting to the GJA the shining example of the Pulitzer Prize. But it fell on deaf ears. 

Here in Ghana, if one needs to make reference to say the story that saw the Journalist of the Year 2014 being crowned winner, such a person would have to personally contact the journalist. It is but shameful that the GJA cannot boast of a website of international repute not to talk of compiling the works of journalists.

But wait! This is just a tip of the iceberg of GJA’s woes. For many of its members, it practically does nothing aside organizing annual awards. The GJA is likened to a newspaper vendor in Sunyani with a lost direction. 

In 2002 when I had successfully convinced my parents that I needed to wear lens, I was taken to the then Sunyani Municipal Eye Clinic.

At the wait-room together with other patients to see Dr. Asuboteng, I shivered. I was told by friends that one cannot acquire a lens without being operated upon. I just feared that notion.

It was, however, not long after I had sat at the cemetery-like wait-room that the place resounded with laughter relieving me of my fears. Why?

A newspaper vendor had stormed the eye clinic pitching his newspapers to patients of various degrees of eye conditions. Sitting at my far right, a man of about 45 years old buried his chin in his left palm. He had the right eye plastered.

“Yes Graphic, Millor [he meant The Mirror],” the young man called on his prospective customers to purchase his newspapers.

For close to three minutes the newspaper vendor walked through the eye clinic eagerly announcing his presence. Then, the one-eye man gently called him.

“So when you look through all these patients,” he said to the vendor pointing his hand to the patients, “do you in your wisdom think we have eyes to read your papers when we buy them?”

What ensued was what seemed like an unending laughter. 

The Ghana Journalists Association, like that newspaper vendor, has content to sell. What has, however, become the challenge to the GJA is the targeting and focusing on the very people for whose interest it represents.

Aside the annual awards, the GJA must standby its members but not undeservedly. When most Ghanaian journalists dropped tears following the passing away of Ghanaian Times’ Samuel Nuamah, I was saddened how the GJA President, Dr. Affail Monney, handled matters. In his interview with the media on the account that led to the Presidential Press Corps’ accident, I think he sounded more a spokesperson of the ruling government than a ‘caretaker’ of Ghana’s journalists. 

In a sharp contrast to the above, I think it was undeservedly appalling the GJA’s ‘excitement’ over the pardoning of the Montie 3 by President Mahama. Free speech does not mean the journalist can trade insults. So, the Montie 3 needed no sympathy from the GJA. What do you think?

Aside the annual awards, the GJA must be reminded that most of its people are either wallowing in poverty or being exploited by some unscrupulous media owners. Indeed, many are journalists who seem to have ordained poverty as their God just that they cannot publish their own predicaments as they do for others.

It will be prudent that the GJA in consultation with appropriate offices draft a pay structure for media owners. Here, a red line is drawn such that a journalist cannot be paid less than a stipulated amount depending on the journalist’s qualification. 

Aside the annual awards, the GJA must be able to get every media house to own what I refer to as ‘newsroom wardrobe.’ In this wardrobe are reporters’ working gear including helmets, bullet proof vests among others.

Whereas the newsroom wardrobe may sound laughable, I think it is high time we as journalists realized that we are not supper humans from people who suffer injuries during protests and demonstrations.

Not too long ago, I listened to a Joy FM reporter who narrated how he narrowly escaped being hit by a bullet somewhere at Kasoa during a demonstration. If we are to give a platform for journalists to share such moments they nearly kissed death, we will perhaps need a whole month to chronicle such accounts.

Elsewhere in the Whiteman’s land, these protective gears for journalists are considered paramount. Election 2016 is just around the corner and, again, journalists will dare reporting from hotspots without taking into consideration their own safety.

I am not in any way demeaning the office or rubbishing the awards of the GJA. I look forward to competing in the near future. What I am trying to drum home is simple; that the Ghanaian journalists’ happiness must not be a fleeting-funfair of annual jamboree. 

The GJA must wake up for the sleep that last from one market day to the other becomes death. Congratulations to the GJA Journalist of the Year 2015!

The writer is a broadcast journalist with 3FM 92.7. Views expressed here solely remain his opinion and not that of his media organization. Talking Drum is published on 3news.com

Email: nehusthan4@yahoo.com

Twitter: @Aniwaba

TALKING DRUM: Child Beggars! A horrifying story of tomorrow’s people

A child putting into his wallet begged-money

Observing her from afar, she looks through the passersby like a football coach selecting his potential players. 
 

55 year old Auntie Vero, donning a sporty jacket sits in a wheelchair somewhere at Spanner Junction, a bus stop on the 37-Madina road. 

Hanging on one side of her wheelchair is a blue container which serves as a receptacle of the goodwill showered on her by passersby. These are either those touched by her plight or irritated by the incessant calls by her for money. 

Physically challenged, Auntie Vero begs for a living. She tells me her son, a JHS graduate and an iced water seller, would sit her at her begging point in the morning at the Spanner Junction and takes her home at sun set. 

“If I mean to go home, it is just a phone call away and my son will come and take me away. He sells iced water on the streets,” Auntie Vero said. 

She reveals she ended up physically challenged at the age of two, her mother had told her. A Whiteman who tried to help took her to Nsawam but the treatment was unsuccessful. 

Auntie Vero would later learn a trade at the social welfare Centre. She learnt needle work and specialized in making stuffed toys. She, however, says economic factors forced her to quit establishing herself in the trade to hitting the streets to beg for a living.

“After I had made the stuffed toys, I struggled to get people to buy it in bulk from me; I couldn’t withstand the financial burden. It was then that a visually impaired woman introduced me to do begging on the streets.” 

Auntie Vero is not the first and she won’t be the last in the begging business. Almost on all the streets of the capital city, Accra, one would see beggars going about their business of soliciting for money.

There are those who have found jobs helping other people to beg. At Kaneshie First Light, in Accra, Richard Oppong, a visually impaired young man sits in-between two parked saloon cars. 

He tells me he hires the services of such persons. “What I do is to hire these people [one person at a time] to take me to the streets to beg. So, they will take the money and give it to me. At the end of the day, I give my assistant one-third out of the total proceeds,” says Richard.

Mr. Latif Yusuf is an Anthropology and History lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Journalism. He says begging has been one prominent issue history has known off.

“The history of begging started in the Biblical period, moving down to individual countries and communities. Begging in general in recent period started [maybe] due to the breakdown of our extended family system. The extended family afforded people who are hard up to seek for help from other family members.”

Auntie Vero says she makes at most 15GHC a day out of begging. She bemoaned her benefactors giving her coins instead of paper notes.

However, the trade which Auntie Vero says does not fetch her enough money is said to be illegal. Lawyer Kwamina Mensah says begging “is actually a criminal offence in Ghana. The Beggars and Destitute Act (1969) clearly states that.” 

He adds that he who encourages one to beg is him or herself guilty before the law. 

If begging is an offence, why do we see children indulging in it too? These children, basically, abandon school to hunt for monies on the streets.

Meet Mary Seidu, a class two pupil who together with her mother beg for money at the Canadian Embassy area on the 37-Madina bound road. 

She says she joins her mother at the begging point whenever she closes from school. When asked why she begs, Mary said she does so because they need ‘something’ to survive on. 

At the Kwame Nkrumah Circle and other places such as Lapaz and around the Accra Mall area, some foreign nationals push their children onto the streets to beg. These children would hold a passerby insisting the passerby gives them money.

Right in front of me at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, a young boy held the skirt of Comfort, a passerby, for money. She says these children aggressively attacking their targets is worrying.

Similarly, at around the Accra Mall another child accosted a young man for money. The man who gave his name as Nick says the situation is embarrassing.

For Comfort and Nick, they want something to be done about the situation.

The question one would like to ask is how did these foreigners come into the country and with what intention? My efforts to get the Ghana Immigration Service respond to this question yielded no results. 

However, pieces of information I picked from the grounds indicate that the Ghana Immigration Service itself does not know how these foreigners got into the country. 

Mr. Latif says the influx of these foreign nationals is as the result of the Sahelian drought which occurred in the 1970s-80s.

“Countries such Niger, Mali and Chad were affected forcing most people to move to other places to seek for greener pastures. 

At Lapaz, I interacted with Hamid. Hamid, per my guess, will be about seven years old. He has tried hard enough to learn a little bit of the English Language.

All he could say to me in English was that he was hungry as he pointed his right hand towards his mouth. He makes gestures signaling that he want money from me.

For Mr. Bright Appiah, a Child rights advocate, he is worried over these children indulging in begging on the streets. He says they must be enrolled in school.

He says “these children [both Ghanaians and the foreigners] need to be protected.”

Mr. Benjamin Akonu Otoo is the acting director at the Department of Social Development under the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection.

He says his office is not in a position to cater for these children. 

“It is not that we don’t see these children indulging in begging on the streets. We see them. Mostly, it is the police who have to make the arrest but you ask yourself if they arrest them, where will they take them to?”

Mr. Otoo wants the Beggars and Destitute Act reviewed.

As it stands, begging has become part and parcel of us but the question remains; must children abandon school to beg for a living? And when will the Department of Social Development be resourced enough to take these children from the streets to give them a better future?

By Solomon Mensah

Talking Drum is published on www.3news.com on every Friday. The writer is a broadcast journalist with 3FM 92.7. Views expressed here solely remains his opinion and not that of his media organization.

Email: nehusthan4@yahoo.com

Twitter: @Aniwaba

TALKING DRUM: Montie 3, NDC’s free speech & a Man called ‘Ntensere’

By Solomon Mensah

"Talking Drum" is a column published on www.3news.com on Fridays

On Wednesday, July 27 2016 at the headquarters of the National Democratic Congress at Adabraka in Accra, some supporters of the party had thronged.

Standing either akimbo or with their arms folded on their chests at the forecourt of the premises, they demanded nothing but one thing. That President John Dramani Mahama and the NDC executives should fight for the freeing of the three persons involved in the Montie FM’s said unsavory comments against the Supreme Court judges.

The three sentenced, radio host Salifu Maase alias Mugabe and his panelists Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson were said to have made a life-threatening statements against judges who ordered for the deletion of over 56, 000 ‘illegal’ names from the voters’ register. For being cited for contempt by the Supreme Court, the three after days of trial were each sentenced to four months in prison on that faithful Wednesday. They are, in addition, to pay GHC10, 000 default of which they will serve one month more in prison.

This, these supporters of the ruling NDC deem it too hash a punishment for their colleagues. 

“Massa, all that we are saying is that ‘No Mugabe and Co, no vote,’” some of the angry supporters told me in an interview.

On that Wednesday evening I interviewed Communications Director of the NDC, Solomon Nkansah on 3FM. He said: “We [NDC] aren’t the judiciary but what we can say is that there are a lot of schools of thought and experienced people in the law and they are also calling on persons who … I understand other people should go for review. I am not part of their lawyers but I do believe that the right will be done. 

"I want to use your medium to convey my messages of hope and assurance to the teeming NDC supporters that the NDC party will not turn its back on these three young men. We will do everything to give them the needed support.”

As if the party supporters were not convinced by Mr. Nkansah’s assurance, they picketed again at the party’s headquarters on the following day. When I got there at 10:27am the “freedom fighters” stood wearing red and black apparel yet humming the same chorus; “No Mugabe and Co, no vote.’”  

Angrily waiting for party officials to talk to them the National Chairman of the NDC, Dr. Kofi Porturphy, popped up. He stood face to face with the supporters with just the giant metallic gate of the office’s main entrance separating them. Before Dr. Porturphy would speak, he ordered all journalists out of their meeting. Yes! He had a secret to share with the supporters. 

After about seven minutes, the supporters who were earlier fuming with anger were now cheering up their National Chairman. When I drew near some of these supporters I was told that Dr. Porturphy had told them the President John Dramani Mahama has heard their cry and that “he [the president] will surely do something about the situation.”

It is disheartening to know that the NDC is basing its argument on “free speech” in calling on President Mahama to exercise his constitutional powers to free the Montie 3.

Aside Mr. Solomon Nkansah who had told me, as part of my interview with him, that the sentencing of the Montie 3 curtails free speech, I have as well read and heard some other party officials saying same. 

In their petition to the president to invoke such constitutional powers under Article 72 of the Constitution of Ghana, solicitors Ato Dadzie and George Loh wrote that they accept the decision by the Supreme Court. However, they added that they “do not believe that citizens of Ghana ought to be committed to prison for infractions on free expression especially in light of the repeal of the criminal libel law.”

How do we understand free speech? Does free speech mean one could let derogatory words freely leave their mouths as droplets of milk freely leave a lactating mother’s breasts?

Early this year, working as a freelancer, I wrote a piece on Radio Ghana’s News Commentary segment of its news bulletin. It was about France’s satirical magazine called Charlie Hebdo who had had some of its staff killed including the editor by some aggrieved persons. Their crime? Charlie Hebdo had consistently drew irreverent cartoons of Prophet Muhammad that which the killers deemed it an affront on their religion.

When the Charlie Hebdo’s sad news broke, the world saw prominent personalities calling the ‘barbaric act’ as a threat to free speech. Freedom of speech [and for that matter freedom of the media] does not in any way mean that one’s speech should be a threat or ridicule to another man’s peace.

Do we call a threat to kill some judges as a freedom of speech? Only in Ghana! Whereas the NDC’s call for a lesser punishment for the Montie 3 maybe somewhat reasonable, I think freeing them entirely would give the rest of Ghanaians derogatory license in our media discourse. What do you think?

On social media and on other platforms, some people are in a way jubilating over the Montie 3’s imprisonment. I am not, however, surprised. Are you? In this country, everything boils down to NPP or NDC. But we must not forget the nickname ‘Ntensere’ of Michael Boateng Amanfo’s character Kofi Bεyεεdεn, in his book Sε Ɛbεwie.

Sticking to Kofi Bεyεεdεn’s nickname without going into details of the book, it is advisable we desist from rejoicing over someone’s mistake for tomorrow may be our turn. 

What I think we ought to do is to learn from the Montie 3’s mistakes. In my article on the Charlie Hebdo’s stupidity, I offered one advice in a form of a proverb to other media persons and to those who have access to such platforms.

That, “a child whose father received bullet in the head,” the Igbos of Nigeria say, “uses an iron pot as a helmet.”

The writer is a broadcast journalist with 3FM 92.7. Views expressed here remain solely his opinion and not that of his media organization.

Email: nehusthan4@yahoo.com

Twitter: @Aniwaba