I sincerely do not know what the professional title of “High Voltage Authorized Engineer” in the United Kingdom of Great Britain means, but my deliberately hazarded guess is that the man who wrote the fairly long and very instructive article captioned “Multimedia Dragged to National Media Commission Over Ejura Violence” (Modernghana.com 7/30/21) may very well be a crackerjack Electrical Engineer somewhere in the Greater London Metropolitan Area or the British Metropolis who works with the UK’s National Railroad Network, that is, the approximate equivalent of what those of us resident right here in the Tri-State Area of the New York Metropolis call the Transit Authority or Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), administratively, functionally and organically encompassing the States of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
My own elder sibling is a Columbia University-trained Nuclear Physicist who has in the past designed some of the bombs that have been dropped by commanders from the various divisions of the United States’ Military abroad, so I tend not to be visibly shaken, inordinately impressed or unduly flummoxed by such socially self-preening and high-sounding or pontifical professional titles and accolades. Everyone has their own professional area of expertise; at the end of the day, what matters most is what author Peter Antwi-Boasiako has to say about the seismically disturbing quality of the journalistic or media practice of quite a remarkable percentage of the Joy-FM or Multimedia-Ghana employees. And truth be said: Which is that Mr. Antwi-Boasiako has a lot to say about the recent coverage of the Asante-Ejura or Mampong-Ejura Hostilities, as I have decided to characterize it, that is not only relevant but also very damning and inescapably instructive at the same time for both Mr. Kwasi Twum, proprietor of the Multimedia Network Company and some of his radio-broadcast employees, whom Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, a formidable media mogul in his own right and Chairman of the Parliamentary Defense and Interior Committee, has publicly and virulently accused of having personally revealed to him, Mr. Agyapong, that the Supreme Overlord of the Multimedia stables, as it were, is hell-bent on a patently ungodly mission to use his great power and influence in the Ghanaian media to destabilize our country and possibly topple the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), unless the latter political establishment, or the key operatives of the same, offered humongous financial support to the Multimedia Company, possibly the largest and most far-reaching media institutional establishment in Ghana.
Mr. Agyapong, who is also the ruling New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central Constituency, in the Central Region, has also made the very public claim that Mr. Kwasi Twum has personally paid him a visit in his office, at the KenCity Media Network or Company, to let on his aforementioned extortion mission, which has the rather lurid political edge of seeking to play the key operatives of the country’s two major political parties and ideological camps, namely, the Akufo-Addo-led ruling New Patriotic Party, on the one hand, and the John “Akonfem-Kanazoe-SADA” Dramani Mahama-led main opposition National Democratic congress, on the other, against one another. The preceding very reliable Kennedy Agyapong testimony gives credence to the incontrovertible fact that Mr. Erastus Asare-Donkor, a Multimedia Network employee, who has been mischievously playing victim or political underdog in the wake of the exposure of his deliberately shlocky reportage of the Ejura Hostilities, with a quite disturbing if also a remarkable groundswell of public support, was politically motivated to flagrantly and egregiously put the Akufo-Addo Administration in an extremely bad light in the public imagination vis-à-vis the widely alleged National Democratic Congress-sponsored seditious and faux-civic propaganda campaign codenamed #FixTheCountry.
We absolutely know for a fact that the #FixTheCountry campaign is NDC-sponsored because not only is the group staunchly backed by an agenda-bereft National Democratic Congress’ leadership, the contents of the agenda of the promoters of the #FixTheCountry campaign reads tritely as if they have been lifted hook, line and sinker from the so-called Green Book authored by the Mahama Posse, rudely and shamelessly spearheaded by Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the long-indicted but yet to be tried or trialed National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress. At any rate, I have already written extensively about the Ejura Hostilities or the Ejura Violence and raised many of the same issues, concerns and questions raised by Mr. Antwi-Boasiako and therefore see absolutely no meaningful reasons or purpose to rehash the same here, except, of course, to add my voice to Mr. Antwi-Boasiako’s call on both the executive operatives of the National Media Commission (NM) and the National Communications Authority (NCA) to give Mr. Antwi-Boasiako’s laudably substantiated grievances all the necessary attention that each and every single one of them deserves.
This is scandalously ironic because under the protracted tenure of the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the country was effectively frozen by what infamously became known as the “Culture of Silence.” The latter terror-charged climate also pretty much punctuated the 8-year “democratic” tenure of the recently deceased President Jerry John Rawlings-led regime of the National Democratic Congress. Under the present Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party, the pendulum well appears to have swung towards what may be aptly described as a veritable Media Season of Anomy. For author Peter Antwi-Boasiako, however, there is an imperative necessity for media watchdog establishments like the National Media Commission and the National Communications Authority to promptly and expeditious act to restore sanity to Ghana’s mainstream media practice. I could not agree more with this most concerned of patriotic critics.
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 8, 2021
E-mail: [email protected]