Before Captain Smart came from Kumasi in the Ashanti Region to ply his journalism in Accra, there were seasoned, tested, refined, well educated, presentable and respectable journalists working in our radio and TV stations in Accra.
The names are too numerous to mention here but I believe you know some of them. When this Johnny Just Come (JJC) entered the media landscape in Accra, things changed.
Respect and professional ethics were thrown to the dogs and in their places, Captain Smart introduced insults, unsubstantiated allegations, media terrorism, blackmail, disrespect to senior citizens and even the Vice President and the President of the Republic were not spared of his vitriolic invectives.
He tarnished and continues to tarnish the reputations of fine ladies and gentlemen who have made it in life through the hard way and he has the funny feeling that the world is on his shoulders. He thinks he is the only one who could spit fire. In fact, he thinks if you go to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, everything is for free.
Anytime he was sued, he passed through backdoor to apologize and continued with his trademark insults and defamations thinking no Jupiter could stop him. All along, I knew it will come to this. I knew he will one day step on the toes of somebody who will make him smell pepper.
He told the world that the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta, has taken 10% kickback of the IMF loan the government contracted to salvage the economy and that is very, very serious. And when Ken Ofori Atta sued he said any stupid person can sue. What a braggart!
You don’t take just one minute to destroy the hard won reputation of a gentleman and go about swaggering as if the law courts are toothless bulldogs. There is a price to pay and Captain Smart and his media house should prepare to face the consequences.
If even Captain Smart renders an apology through the great Otumfuor Osei Tutu II, the Finance Minister should politely tell His Royal Majesty to keep his distance because he has been defamed to the extent that if he accepts the apology and allows matters to die, his children and grandchildren will carry the burden long after he, Ken was gone.
And the Asantehene knows how important it is for one to guide and protect jealously his reputation. That is why no one dare disrespect or treat the Otumfuor with contempt. The price will be too high for such a person to pay.
If he runs to the Ya Na, the gates of the Gbewa Palace should not be opened for him to enter because he once insulted the whole Northern fraternity, including the Ya Na, the overlord of the Dagbon State.
That is sacrilegious and so Smart cannot enter the palace. Do you remember when that Takoradi woman faked her pregnancy and kidnap, Captain Smart told the world that he knew the woman and that indeed the woman was pregnant? When it turned out that the woman faked her pregnancy and the Western Regional Minister spoke to the media to clear the fog, insolent and snobbish Captain Smart said the Regional Minister was acting foolishly like a politician from the Northern Region.
As for the Ofori Panin Fie, he should know he is a persona non grata. Going there will be like running to hide in the mouth of the lion! His cup is full and overflowing. The chickens have come home to roost.
We have some journalists in this country who erroneously think the repeal of the Criminal Libel Law is a license for them to engage in journalistic peccadilloes, serious defamation of people’s hard won reputation and absurd comments which border on ignorance and stupidity.
If this Captain Smart guy faces the law and the law says you can defame somebody like the way he has done to Ken Ofori Atta and go scot free, so be it.
A precedent will then be set and the floodgates will be opened for all of us to go wayward, damn any court suit. After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. But if the court decides otherwise, I don’t expect any senseless and power hungry politician or group of persons to call it witch hunting because if indeed, there are witches among us, they must be hunted down.
But on a more serious note, this country has a huge problem on drug addiction, particularly among some broadcast journalists. If you take your time and listen to some of them, you can easily realize that their comments don’t add up.
They just rumble, rubble rouse, jumble and beat about the bush. Because they are hirelings of some politicians, they have enough money to buy hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, barbiturates, LSD, Purple Violet etc. As for tramodol, they swallow them like the way a chicken swallows a grain of corn. Some of them have turned marijuana to cigarette and they puff away even in public. And when they go high, they sit behind the microphone and spew out nothing but balderdash and unprintable comments. After all, are they not ‘uncooked’ journalists?
We used to say politics is a dirty game but the pendulum is now swinging to the left. Journalismis rather gradually becoming a dirty profession by the grace of persons like Captain Smart and his fellow stomach journalists.
I really don’t know where these half-baked so-called journalists learnt their trade. A good journalist must try, as one of the tenets of the profession says, not to be bias. But what do we see? Some journalists are paid by faceless politicians to lie and destroy the reputations of their political opponents.
We are all in the Inky Fraternity but when you see some of our colleagues ridding luxurious cars and living in mansions of architectural wonder, you begin to ask yourself: Where did they get the money from?. Definitely not from their take home pay which cannot take them to the ‘trotro’ station. They simply blackmail and extort monies from people to grow rich.
Some are hired to close their eyes at anything good that the government does and lie through their teeth to satisfy their shameless paymasters. The seriousness of their behavior is that in case the party they work for comes to power one day, it will be payback time for another group of journalist who move in sympathy with the losing party. Theirs could be dirtier since no one will have the moral right to whip them into line. Can we continue like this if we want the nation to move forward? Land of our DEATH, we pledge to thee!!!
Eric Bawah