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

Reports that the Ministry of Information decided to purchase laptop computers for some media houses with the GHC 1 million earmarked for the development of journalism in the country sometime prior to the passing of President John Evans Atta-Mills, if memory serves yours truly accurately, is very disturbing, to say the least (See "Media Fund Was Not Used The Right Way - Kwesi Pratt" Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/23/13).

I am not privy to the trend of distribution of such laptops, but it peevishly smacks of bribery. If, indeed, the erstwhile Mills-Mahama - and now Mahama/Amissah-Arthur - government sincerely believed in the development of the quality of media praxis in the country, as was then touted as the overriding objective of the fund, the most constructive approach would have been for the Ministry of Information to have collaborated with either the Department of Mass Communications at the University of Ghana, the Ghana Institute of Journalism or even the Media Foundation for West Africa to organize workshops dealing with the latest trends and developments in the industry and the profession.

Indeed, as I pointed out back then, the most appropriate organization or establishment to disburse such fund is not the Ministry of Information, an executive sub-branch of a government that is historically and morbidly partisan and irredeemably vengeful as the National Democratic Congress (NDC). And, of course, neither would it have been any more appropriate if a far more liberal Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government were at the helm of affairs.

The fact of the matter is that the media function best when they are afforded the maximum latitude of independence by the central government. And such independence, of course, equally applies to such state-owned establishements as the Daily Graphic, Ghanaian Times and the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. Those Nkrumah days when the media primarily existed as a bona fide subsidiary of the so-called Convention People's Party (CPP), or like the state-run Information Services Department, almost wholly focused on propaganda journalism, are long gone.

Ghanaians have come a long way, far well along enough to fully appreciate the beneficent significance of democratic accountability. In brief, it is nothing short of the abjectly insulting for any government cabinet operative to cavalierly presume that the mere acquisition of laptops is the most significant problem afflicting the country's media organizations. Rather, it is the crude application of intimidation tactics - both financially and politically - that is the bane of Ghanaian journalism.

Even as I write, there are several media websites that would not publish my columns for fear of having advertising revenue withheld from them, or diverted elsewhere, by the government. This is what the Ghanaian public ought to worry about most.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 23, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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