Re: “Ghana’s France Ambassador Reconciles Community Through Sports”

GHANA FAMILY FUN DAY 2018, Paris
The Planning Committee of the Ghana Family Fun Day event that took place on Saturday 29^th September 2018 in Paris, France would like to go on record to refute the sports news article that appeared on page 28 of the Ghanaian Times newspaper of 5th October 2018. Purportedly penned by Nyanfeiku Andor, “a Paris-based sports journalist who writes for the OffSide magazine in Sweden”, the article, titled “Ghana’s France Ambassador reconciles community through sports” is an example of “yellow journalism” probably at its worst.

We understand that as a sports journalist, Mr. Andor would naturally be biased towards focusing on the sports part of the multi-faceted event. But really, which part of the article reported on the sports content of the event apart from stating the obvious that there was “a number of sporting events including athletics, football, sac [sic] race, dancing competition, ludo, round chair sits-up, draughts, and many other games”? And by the way, we never knew that “dancing competition”, “ludo”, “round chair sits-up” (please it is called “musical chairs”) and “draughts” are sporting events! Taking the football for instance, readers would probably have appreciated knowing for example, the number and composition of participating teams, how many matches were played and the manner in which they were organized, and the fact that Her Excellency the Ambassador scored the lone goal for the women’s team! By the way, the Ambassador also won the musical chairs competition!

If Mr. Andor had wanted to do an honest and objective report of the event, he could have talked to Dr. Elizabeth Sarkodie-Mensah, initiator and overall coordinator, or any of the Planning Committee members to get the real facts surrounding the genesis, planning, execution of, and motivation for the Ghana Family Fun Day 2018 event. He would have learned among other things that the Planning Committee was made up of a cross-section of the Ghanaian community leadership including pastors and other leaders of Christian churches, representatives of the Muslim community, leaders of traditional/ethnic-based associations (chiefs and queens), and leaders/members of professional associations, who met on a weekly basis for the two months preceding the event.

These leaders belong to a wider WhatsApp group of more than eighty community leaders, initially created for the event but now becoming a vital and inclusive channel of communication for the community’s leaders. The Planning Committee would have told him that we also had a separate group of youth leaders and students who met every week for the same two months to plan and strategize. And that the two groups of leaders (older and younger) worked synergistically to produce the unprecedented event which saw over 1,000 people (including children) in attendance (we actually counted participants by issuing them numbers as they entered the grounds, and stopped counting after 1,000!).

If Mr. Andor had asked the event organizers, they would have told him about the various sub-committees established with express terms of reference to handle the venue/security/discipline; food and drinks; fun and games; and publicity; as well as the significant number of other volunteers who joined up on the day of the event. Indeed the Planning Committee would have furnished him with any relevant facts he needed. Instead, he chose to abandon even his focus of sports to delve into matters, real or imagined, that had little or nothing to do with the Ghana Family Fun Day event, and most of which were untrue.

He reports that the Ambassador “patched up some ‘disturbing’ differences among the Ghanaian community living in [France], using sports as the tool for reconciliation”. Some of these differences, he claims “bordered on chieftaincy issues, [and] were said to be derailing the progress of the community.” The Planning Committee considers this to be nothing more than a deliberate attempt to cause pure mischief.

Referring to the Ambassador’s short speech to the gathering, Mr. Andor claims to quote Her Excellency Anna Bossman as saying, “Without peace, we cannot develop as a people and as a community and it’s high time we buried the hatchet, move on and live together in unity.” Much as the sentiments expressed here are noble and laudable, the Ambassador never uttered those words that he directly attributes to her, nor even spoke in those terms. Both the audio file and video footage of that segment of the programme are available for anybody’s perusal.

According to Mr. Andor, “the event was really historic as it afforded all affected parties the opportunity to pour their hearts out.” Was the event then a sort of Native American-style peace pipe-smoking ceremony, or a kind of town-hall meeting? He actually calls the event a “meeting”! Ghana Family Fun Day 2018 was exactly that: a God-given beautiful day of good food, sports, traditional and board games, an open market of mostly Ghanaian products, sheer fun and good cheer for the entire Ghanaian Community family in Paris and its surrounding region.

Additionally, Mr. Andor would have appreciated the fact that the event was wholly co-sponsored, co-financed and co-presented by the Ghanaian Community itself and the Embassy of Ghana in a unique collaboration that can become a model for other Embassies and Ghanaian communities in the diaspora. So, to claim that “Brussels Airlines was the headline sponsor of the event” is a blatant lie for which the organizers of the event demand a retraction or apology from the newspaper and/or its reporting correspondent. To claim after the publication of the article that his editor “did a shoddy work”, and that it was a “totally edited story” is totally disingenuous on Mr. Andor’s part, to say the least. The editor does not live in Paris, and we know that news editors do not work with thin air, but rather the text that the reporter submits to them.

Therefore, by the foregoing, the Planning Committee of the Ghana Family Fun Day (Paris 2018) wishes to distance itself from this gross misrepresentation of facts masquerading as journalistic reporting in the sports section of the Ghanaian Times.