Is Daily Guide the Propaganda Wing of the New Patriotic Party?

I have been following the political pronouncements and other media-oriented activities of the Franklin-Cudjoe-led IMANI-Africa think-tank for about a decade now, if memory serves yours truly accurately. That was also about the time when his institute was called IMANI-Ghana public policy watchdog, just as the Daily Guide newspaper morphed itself from the more localized latter name to Daily Guide Africa. So, really, in some quite striking and credible respects, I have tended to envisage both IMANI and the Daily Guide to be treading the same pan-Africanist path. Still, in spite of its spasmodic capriciousness with what kinds of issues it seeks to excavate and bring into the media spotlight, IMANI has been the more balanced and objective of the two establishments. If, as the editors and publishers of the Freddie Blay-owned Daily Guide newspaper claims, to wit, that the Cudjoe-led IMANI-Africa is a rented civil society organization, then one is apt to wonder whether the Daily Guide, which is owned by the National Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), is also not the rented propaganda mouthpiece of the NPP (See “A Rented Civil Service Group Gets Busy” Daily Guide/Modernghana.com 9/14/18).

The operatives of the Daily Guide may not like the stance taken by the operatives of the IMANI-African think-tank, but it goes way overboard for a newspaper whose coeditor or former coeditor, now resident in Germany as Ghana’s Chief Diplomat, once privileged advertising cedis or dollars, irrespective of sources, over principled party loyalty when it most mattered, could muster the chutzpah to be calling another civil-society watchdog such an unpalatable and perhaps even an undeserved name as “a rented civil society organization,” merely because the Founder-President of the IMANI-Africa think-tank has dared to align his institutional policy stance, at least on one particular critical issue, behind the embattled Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo, the Auditor-General, who clearly appears to be locked in a fierce battle of wills with the Chairperson of the government-appointed Audit Services Board. Of course, it would be remiss to equally point out the fact that the Auditor-General is also a bona fide government appointee, though his eleventh-hour appointment to the post by a lame-duck President John Dramani Mahama left much to be desired.

The editors and publishers of the Daily Guide characterized the way and manner in which the then-Acting Auditor-General was promoted to substantive Auditor-General as an “injury-time appointee.” Now, I find the latter characterization to be rather amusing, in view of the fact that while as Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Guide Mrs. Gina Blay was publicly and virulently accused by some operatives of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party, in the leadup to the 2016 general election, of harboring questionable loyalties towards the NPP, Mrs. Blay’s rather scandalous but, nevertheless, perfectly understandable response was that the Daily Guide, to be able to stay in business over the long-haul in the country’s treacherous political terrain, had to pragmatically and thoroughly depoliticize, as well as decouple, the critical question of where the editors and publishers of her paper decided to either solicit or accept advertising dollars. Mrs. Blay’s paper had just taken in and prominently published advertisements passionately promoting the reelection bid of then-President John Dramani Mahama, even while also publishing news pieces and advertisements promoting the Presidential Candidacy of the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Mrs. Blay would later quizzically suggest that while her husband and head of the Blay Family, then-Acting National Chairman of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party, was a staunch NPP partisan and a key player, the rest of the Blay Family was thoroughly composed of “NPP Sympathizers.” On the latter count, one is direly tempted to slip into this discussion the recent very public to-do between Togbe Afedi, of the Ho-Asogli Traditional Area of the Volta Region, in which the latter chieftain, who is also President of the National House of Chiefs, reminded the Nzema-Akan-descended Mr. Blay that his wife was an Ewe-descended woman from the Volta Region. Togbe Afedi and the members of his Asogli Traditional Council went on to sternly warn Mr. Blay that his safety could not be guaranteed, if the National Chairman of the ruling party made the prohibitive mistake of setting foot on the sacred soils of the Volta Region, which these Asogli Micro-Nationalists appeared to misguidedly envisage to be synonymous with Eweland.

It is clear that somebody on the Governing Board of the Audit Services Department is doggedly and implacably prosecuting his/her own private and personally vindictive agenda against Mr. Domelevo, which may not necessarily be in synch with that of Jubilee House, which, by the way, has already opened up an enquiry into complaints lodged by the Auditor-General categorically stating that the Chairperson of the Government Board of the Audit Services Department has been illegally and unconstitutionally interfering with his work. Now, it goes without saying that Mr. Cudjoe, the IMANI-Africa boss, has an inalienable democratic right to choose which side of the controversy between the Auditor-General and the Chairperson of the Audit Services Department to back without being called unpalatable names by the operatives of a media establishment with clearly defined partisan loyalties.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 16, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]