Prof. Martey ~ Bad professionals must reform

The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Right Reverend Professor Emmanuel Martey, has charged bad professionals in the various state institutions to reform their ways in the quest to build a prosperous nation.

He said the various institutions of state, who should be at the helm of safeguarding the democratic process, were losing their credibility because of a few bad nuts who were indulging in acts that were detrimental to the democratic process.

“Just as there are bad pastors, bad politicians and bad journalists, there are bad policemen but let us not judge institutions by the bad nuts,” he said.

Rt Rev. Prof. Martey, who was addressing the concluding part of the Graphic/STAR-Ghana National Dialogue on Media Ethics and Transparency in Frequency Allocation in Accra, said the surest means towards reforms was for the activation of civil society.

Moving forward, he challenged the media to conscientise civil society to become more proactive in taking the necessary steps to address national challenges and accelerate the country’s pace of development.

That, he said, could be attained if the media told the people the truth about the situation they were in currently and where they ought to be.

“The media is there to protect the interest of the citizenry, warning and conscientising them about the situation in which they are and the situation in which they ought to be. This is what we need,” he said.

Civil society in Ghana, he observed, had become passive, therefore, requiring the need for such conscientisation that will galvanise it into action.

The Moderator said no government could be held accountable if civil society was not well informed about what government and state institutions were doing or failing to do.

He said that a very effective watchdog was badly needed in young democracies, such as Ghana, that were not strong and could easily be pressurised by ruling governments.

“Besides in situations where legislatures, judiciaries and other oversight bodies appointed by the government are powerless against governing officials or themselves corruptible, it is the media that is left as an institution that can truly check against corrupt leadership and abuse of power,” he said.

But such democratic role on the part of the media, he advised, called for boldness in exposing abuse and excesses of all leaders in society at the political, religious, traditional, corporate, and all other levels.

Towards that end, he said, it was regrettable that some journalists in the state media were placed on the payroll of governments to work as spies on their colleagues who were tagged as being against the government in power.

The Ghanaian media, he admitted, was faced by a range of ethical issues on a daily basis and, therefore, advised that journalists must endeavour to live by the Ghana Journalists Association code of ethics as the surest means for self-monitoring.

Rev. Martey said the National Communications Authority (NCA) had to cede its mandate of allocating frequencies to the National Media Commission while it provided technical support.

He advocated public hearings on the allocation of frequencies as a sure means of ensuring transparency and due diligence.

The Managing Director of the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCGL), Mr Ken Ashigbey, said Graphic’s partnership with STAR-Ghana was a move to ensure the company’s involvement in the solutions to the challenges that confront the country.

He said there were basic questions in the media landscape that had to be addressed comprehensively in order to avoid a “tyranny of the press” and the collaboration had advanced that cause.

The Project Manager of STAR-Ghana, Mr Ibrahim Amadu Tanko, said even though the media had been at the forefront of the struggle for democracy, its actions after the attainment had tended to threaten the process, hence the investment of resources by STAR-Ghana to address some of those challenges.

Source: graphic news