... GNA Acts As NDC Propaganda Tool

I first lost respect for the Ghana News Agency (GNA), as a major national institution of information production and dissemination, in the summer of 1982, when after an Asante-Regional delegates’ congress roundly rejected the first budgetary policy of the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the GNA inexplicably and untenably reported that the Kumasi branch of the National Youth Organizing Commission (NYOC), sponsor of the Asante-Regional delegates’ congress, had registered its overwhelming support for the PNDC.

If this writer, who was also the youngest congressional participant recalls accurately, Mr. Kwasi Owusu was the Asante-Regional Secretary then. The National Youth Organizing Commission, formerly called the National Youth Council (NYC), roundly rejected the maiden budget of the PNDC on the incontrovertibly rational grounds that Mr. Rawlings and his Abongo Boys, quizzically, or quite inexplicably, sought to seriously undermine the very pretext, premise or stated objective, upon which the PNDC had predicated its violent and summary overthrow of the Limann-led and Nkrumah-leaning People’s National Party (PNP) government.

The main argument of the National Youth Organizing Commission’s delegates to the Asante-Regional Congress, later re-designated nationally as the People’s Assembly, was that while the PNDC self-righteously claimed to represent the sacred and inviolable interests of the proverbial average Ghanaian citizen, particularly the rural Ghanaian farmer, the price of cutlass, or machete, the single most significant occupational implement of the Ghanaian farmer, had been astronomically raised nearly three-fold – or 300-percent – by the “revolutionary” government of the PNDC.

The delegates highlighted the wickedly ironic fact that under the Limann Administration, the official market price of a machete, or cutlass, had been pegged at ¢ 19.50 (Nineteen-and-Half Cedis), during the last Limann budgetary promulgation. A further irony, the NYOC noted, was that even as it callously raised the price of a machete by 300-percent, the PNDC vehemently insisted that the latter, more than any other preceding government, harbored the very best interests of the Ghanaian farmer, in particular, and the economic underdog, in general. As they say, the preceding was an eerily accurate portent of what lay in store for those naïve and unsuspecting Ghanaians who had rushed in support of the fast-talking and demagogic Mr. Rawlings and his self-appointed Apostles of Revolutionary Development.

What piqued the interest of this writer, back then, was the apparently inexplicable complicity of the reporters of the Ghana News Agency with a populist military government that cavalierly seemed to be hell-bent on seriously undermining the quality of life of the very people whom Mr. Rawlings and his PNDC jihadistically claimed to be safeguarding against pathologically venal civilian governments.

Fortunately, this writer knew Mr. E. N. Aboagye, the Asante-Regional Manager of the Ghana News Agency. Mr. Aboagye’s son was this writer’s acquaintance through the friend of a sibling. The logical step to take, in the face of such flagrant upending of the objective truth, therefore, was to confront the Asante-Regional Manager of the GNA with the latter’s indisputably flagrant breach of journalistic ethics.

To his rudest awakening, this writer would be informed that direct and peremptory instructions had percolated from above, meaning, the national headquarters of the Ghana News Agency, in Accra, to the effect that truth and accuracy were, forthwith, to be sacrificed in staunch defense of “The Revolution,” as Mr. Rawlings and his jackbooted Abongo Boys perceived and unctuously interpreted the same. “Revolution,” indeed, I huffed and cursed under my breath.

We are recalling the preceding events in view of the shocking fabrication of a Ghana News Agency report, published in the Ghanaweb.com edition of January 12, 2008, cavalierly presuming to impugn the electoral legitimacy of the presidential candidate for the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) for Election 2008.

Opening his/her report with the quite provocative caption of “Akufo-Addo is an Illegitimate Flagbearer – NDC” (no allusion or pun, of course, is here intended for Mr. Rawlings), the anonymous GNA reporter, or correspondent, opened her/his lead as follows: “The National Democratic Congress (NDC) on Saturday asserted that the appointment of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo as the flagbearer of the ruling New Patriotic Party is [a] dent on the party’s democratic credentials.”

Needless to say, two questions clearly stand out in the preceding GNA lead. The first is the near-certain possibility of the GNA writer of the preceding lead being a card-carrying member of the so-called National Democratic Congress. We were are quite certain of this because the GNA reporter uses the rather ideologically loaded – or outright volatile – term of “appointment” to describe the publicly hard-fought and hard-won election of Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo as the NPP’s presidential candidate for Election 2008.

It goes without saying that a more professional reporter would have cast the verbally and ideologically loaded term of “appointment” in quotation marks, clearly indicating not only that the latter terminology was part of a reported speech, but also significantly delineating the sacred duty, and mission, of the first-rate reporter to be dispassionate and objective in her/his reportage.

As it stands, the GNA reporter of the afore-referenced lead appears to unreservedly concur with the NDC apparatchiks that, indeed, the unquestionably democratic election of Nana Akufo-Addo as Presidential Candidate of the ruling NPP for Election 2008 is, at best, suspect. This is a clear, classical case of libel on the part of the GNA reporter; and in this particular context, “Libel” is defined as the malicious intent of the GNA reporter not only to impugn the electoral integrity of the newsmaker, Nana Akufo-Addo, the NPP’s Election 2008 presidential candidate, but also the GNA reporter’s malicious intent to call into serious question the entire NPP democratic apparatus, or process, by which the ruling party’s presidential candidate was elected.

And here, also, it may be recalled how this present writer was roundly attacked by a prominent executive of the Ghana News Agency, recently, for daring to point out the obvious, regarding the increasingly mediocre and outright criminal and vapid professional output of the GNA in recent years. Of course, the latter observation is in no way to imply that the GNA has abruptly fallen from a hitherto enviably high standard of information production and dissemination , particularly during the first decade of its establishment as the unapologetic propaganda mouthpiece of the extortionate, Nkrumah-chaperoned government of the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP). Back then, the Ghana News Agency and its founding regime, the CPP, were synonymous and functionally and ideologically interchangeable.

The second question, or factor, that seriously undermines the professional integrity of the Ghana News Agency reporter who composed the article captioned “Akufo-Addo is an Illegitimate Flagbearer – NDC,” is that the NDC critics of the NPP flagbearer, who the GNA reporter appears to delightfully quote, are themselves emphatic and unstinting in their recognition of the indisputable fact of the ruling NPP being the most democratic government of postcolonial Ghana, thus the NDC’s stentorian expression of its apparent disappointment with the election of Nana Akufo-Addo as one that is tantamount to a “dent [or blight] on the party’s [i.e. NPP’s otherwise sterling] democratic credentials.”

In other words, what the NDC critics of the process by which Nana Akufo-Addo was elected flagbearer of the ruling New Patriotic Party are actually saying is that since, indeed, the NPP is, historically, the most democratic government of postcolonial Ghana, the NPP ought to have, perforce, applied a higher standard to the process of electing Nana Akufo-Addo as the party’s flagbearer for Election 2008. Of course, in registering such patently cynical criticism of the NPP, the NDC operatives are fully mindful of the fact that Professor John Evans Atta-Mills, not Nana Akufo-Addo, is, indeed, the only presidential candidate “appointed” by Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, founding-proprietor of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) going into Election 2008.

The preceding notwithstanding, what amazes those of us avid students of postcolonial Ghanaian history is, undoubtedly, the chutzpah mustered by the pistol-whipped and cognitively addled members of a political party whose very hero and icon entered the Ghanaian political landscape by sheer and raw butchery and outright constitutional nullification as well as brazen usurpation. On the other hand, what is incontrovertibly clear, and heartening, from the preceding is the reluctant, albeit quite remarkable, concession of round, and absolute, electoral defeat by the executive members of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), a full eleven months prior to Election 2008.