Getting A Hearing

The media are regarded as objective reporters of good and evil, who scrutinise the passing scene on behalf of a public that can and must appraise the performance of its officials.

Journalists serve as watchdog fourth branch of government, which monitors excesses and misbehaviour of the executive, legislature and judiciary branches.

Through playing adversarial role, journalists provide the feedback that democratic systems need to remain on course. If as a result of their scrutiny governments fall and public officials are ousted, this is as it should be. — Doris Graber.

We must always be grateful for little things. That is why I am appreciative of the reaction of Mr George Amuah, in a reader’s letter published last Friday, August 10, to my article “When you Cheat Ananse” since that is an indication that he read the article.

As George Orwell once wrote, “when I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself I am going to produce a work of art. I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some facts to which I want to draw attention and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

Thus aware that I had the ear of Mr Amuah, I want to submit that as things stand now, there can be no objective way at describing the preferred duration of the Senior High School, except in partisan political lenses.

That is the unfortunate truth, simpliciter. That is why the comment by Mr Amuah in his letter that, “in the process the writer introduced politics into his write-up on education and demonstrated open bias against the government” necessitating his exhortation “let us remove politics and the blame game from discussions relating to critical sectors such as the education sector, to demonstrate objectivity when we have the opportunity to write in a newspaper as highly esteemed as the Daily Graphic” cannot be sustained against me.

How can we do away with politics when in 2008, Parliament passed a law fixing the duration of the Senior Secondary School, renamed Senior High School without dissent only for the law to be amended in 2010 on majority vote, to change the duration to three years?

Indeed, the duration of the SHS was a campaign tool of the National Democratic Congress and it was in the party’s manifesto.

During the vetting of the Minister of Education, Mr Alex Tettey-Enyo, by parliament, he indicated the readiness of the government to opt for a 3-year SHS.

One of the earliest programme under his watch was the national conference on education reforms, where despite the arguments made for and against the change, the consultants virtually told the participants that the three year system was more than a done deal by government.

Indeed, Prof. J. S. Djangmah and Prof. Ivan Addae-Mensah, who have for years advocated four year system informed by evidence-based research, were derided as lacking competence in education policy formulation by the current director of the national service scheme because they did not study education as a subject.

Apart from these processes, the government continually gave the assurance that the necessary infrastructure would be in place before September 2010 each time the public or members of the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) sounded the alarm.

At the Meet-the-Press Series, the government reiterated its readiness to meet all the challenges and announced the release of huge sums towards the construction of classrooms and dormitory blocks to meet the needs of the four year SHS students.

Another batch of four year SHS students were enrolled last September. The back numbers of newspapers are diffused with pledges of government to meet the challenges.

That is why the late call for the military to standby to provide tents, must be seen as very disarming and unnerving, shattering to the ears of students and parents.

That is how the claim of open bias cannot be sustained or held. If the right thing had been done, where would the bias come from? Journalists are enjoined by our Constitution, to among others, hold our government accountable to our people.

The students who will suffer the consequence of the lack of facilities and parents who had been forced or compelled, (volucompu,) to contribute towards building projects for classrooms and dormitories, most of which would be commissioned by government functionaries, who would espouse such projects as evidence of government’s commitment to provide quality education, are better positioned to judge whether the government has been baselessly maligned or needlessly exposed to public ridicule.

Although the GETFund is not bottomless, the timely release of funds would make a big difference. When proceeds are kept in the Consolidated Fund, beyond the legally permitted period of one month, to be transferred into the GETFund account, meaningful development will not occur at the right time. Taxes are not collected a year ahead, but within the year that they are due.

As long as the government is eager to take credit for the cumulative development of the country which predates January 7, 2009, it cannot escape blame or liability for failures which precede January 7, 2009.

The government can only win the trust and confidence of Ghanaians in the education sector if it pursues programmes to meet their aspirations. Those who criticise the government on available facts cannot be said to be biased no matter how extreme their observations.

As Chinua Achebe notes in Anthills of the Savannah, “but what is the use of bending your neck at me like the chicken to the pot when its real enemy is not the pot in which it cooks, nor even the fire which cooks it but the knife,” and more so, the person who killed it. Whenever there are complaints about missing water yams, Praah is never bothered.

There are those who assume that it is wrong for journalists to take on government and that any journalist who criticises any government programme or policy is an enemy to the government, because of the false notion that we must cooperate with government at all times, for the good of our people or euphemistically in the public interest.

We have to dispel such notions and realise, as argued by an editorial in The Times of London in 1852 that “the duty of the journalist is the same as that of the historian, to seek out truth above all things and to present to his readers not such things as statecraft would wish them to know but the truth as near as he can attain it… To require then the journalist and the statesman to conform to the same rules is to mix up things essentially different and is as unsound in theory as unheard of in practice.”

Beyond all things, I am grateful to Mr Amuah. That is how democracy is built and strengthened. We cannot all agree on everything, but when we disagree, we should be able to state our disagreement in civil ways.

Our language must be sane, mindful of the fact that the question of choice is a divine gift and that opinions are alternatives not necessarily in qualitative terms, but to give meaning to our individuality in the middle of collectivism.