Vice President John Dramani Mahama has declared that the government does not take delight in putting journalists behind bars for expressing their views.
In his speech read for him by the Minister of Information, John Tia Akologo, at the 1st New Times Corporation Development Forum, which got underway in Accra Monday, he said, “The government is not interested in muzzling the press, or seeing journalists jailed for their views.”
“I can assure you that in the police debacle with Joy FM and the Ghanaian Times, the government had no visible hand in it. We believe that a government that succeeds in putting one journalist in jail, has only succeeded in giving birth to a dozen others more critical,” added the Vice President.
Touching on the forum, he said the government was going to take the proceedings of such a profession discourse and debate platform seriously, since they had potential to churn out workable and tailored solutions, specific to the Ghanaian context.
He pointed out that a critical look at the development history of the world’s richest nations, clearly revealed that national level dialogue and the brainstorming, helped in finding workable salutations to the many problems confronting their development process.
He commended the Board and Management of the New Times cooperation for creating the platform to deliberate on issues that were of national importance. The minister added that there was so much indiscipline in all spheres of daily activities, stressing that “indiscipline on our roads has become so rampant and ingrained.”
He, therefore, urged the media to play a role in stimulating an attitudinal change, saying, “it is only when the media is seen to be waging a sustained war against indiscipline, that we can overcome these negative attitudes,” and charged the media to also consider urging Ghanaians to patronize made in Ghana products.
Mr. Kofi Asuman, Managing Director of New Times Corporation, in his welcome address, also said the theme for the forum, “Re-orientation for Acceleration Development”, attests to the fact that it was high time Ghanaians eschewed wrong attitudes, indiscipline and wrong political, economic, social and spiritual choices that have been responsible for the country’s lack of sustainable progress as a nation.
“We say accelerated development, because we recognize that although the country is yet to come out of the woods, some progress has been made by successive governments to achieve this level of development,” Mr. Asuman stated.
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Source: The Chronicle/Ghana
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