Freedom of the press has, thanks to the World Press Freedom Day celebrations (which Ghana hosted in Accra between 2 and 3 May 2018), been on the lips of Ghanaian and foreign journalists in the past few days. The Conference has been most stimulating: the difficulty was which discussion session to attend and which to miss. Facilities were first class, and my congratulations go to all those who took part in organising and running it.
The Ghana Ministry of Information and its UNESCO partner; Reporters Without Borders and a host of people hidden from the limelight deserve our hearty congratulations.
The only criticism I shall make of the conference is that it was too “structured”. Not enough time was given, for instance, to participants to make contributions “from the floor.” Yet this is the age of “interaction”.
Not to be able to say what’s weighing on one’s mind, after one has been stimulated to formulate ones loose ideas into a presentable intervention, is enormously frustrating. For instance, at the discussion on the safety of journalists, I wanted to highlight one of the worst practices by journalists forced to work under totalitarian regimes. Some of the worst cowards refuse even to publish the fact that members of their own staff have been arrested, or dismissed! Pompous editors, anxious not to lose their jobs, give the impression that if they adopt a complaisant attitude and “lobby” the oppressive government, it would release the arrested colleague(s). But by neglecting to use the biggest weapon available to them – solidarity to produce massive publicity and united ACTION – journalists unwittingly contribute to their own oppression.
A false sense of “competition” (envy and selfishness, really) makes journalists forget the important ditty penned by Martin Niemuller: “First, they came for the socialists, but I didn’t speak out, because I wasn’t a socialist…..” etc. See: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392
The first thing journalists ought to do, then, is to organise and branch out to achieve strong solidarity with journalists elsewhere.
One journalist in Ghana who believed strongly was the late Henry Ofori (who is often- sadly – absent from Ghana’s honours lists.) As Secretary of the Ghana Journalists Association, he tried to create a strong, non-aligned African Union of Journalists. His idea was pinched by Ghana’s “socialist press” boys, who formed a “Pan-African Union of Journalists” instead. But that Union died with the overthrow of the Nkrumah regime in February 1966.
The Conference has forced me to reflect more deeply on the history of press freedom in Ghana. How many of us have ever heard of Vox Populi (The Voice of the People)? Can Ghanaian journalists answer the question: “What did the imposition of water rates in Accra by the Governor of the Gold Coast contribute to the evolution of the freedom of the press?”
http://pdfproc.lib.msu.edu/?file=/DMC/African%20Journals/pdfs/Institue%20of%20African%20Studies%20Research%20Review/1972v8n3/asrv008003003.pdf
Interestingly enough, some of the “Fathers of Press Freedom In Ghana” were not Ghanaians at all but Africans from neighbouring countries. The two best known are Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, First President of Nigeria and Mr I. T.A. Wallace Johnson, a journalist of Sierra Leone origins.
Dr Azikiwe arrived in the Gold Coast in November 1934 and became the editor of The African Morning Post published in Accra. On May 15, 1936, he published an article entitled “Has the African a God?” written by I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson. Azikiwe was charged with sedition by the Gold Coast colonial government, found guilty and sentenced to six months imprisonment. He was acquitted on appeal, but both he and Wallace Johnson were deported to their respective countries.
In Ghana, Dr Azikiwe had operated in competition with a journalist called Dr J B Danquah, editor of The Times of West Africa. Danquah was secretary to a delegation sent to London in 1934 to protest against the Sedition law under which Dr Azikiwe was charged!
A young man called Kwame Nkrumah whom Dr Azikiwe had met in London and whose services he recommended to the leadership of the UGCC, was also imprisoned for one year for sedition, for material he published in his paper, The Evening News, on his return to Ghana.
Unfortunately, when Nkrumah was released from prison and became Ghana’s powerful leader, he made no bones about respecting freedom of the press. He deported a Sierra Leonean journalist, Bankole Timothy of the Daily Graphic, for publishing an article entitled “What Next, Kwame?”
Nkrumah also jailed, without trial, several journalists, including Kwame Kesse Adu and K Y Attoh (both of the Ashanti Pioneer) and Henry Thomson (of Drum Magazine). The military government that succeeded Nkrumah, the National Liberation Council, claimed to be restoring press freedom to Ghana. But it precipitately dismissed three editors of the government-owned newspapers – Moses Danquah of the Ghanaian Times, John Dumoga of the Daily Graphic and Henry Thompson of The Evening News – when they published articles criticising an agreement the NLC had reached with an American company, Abbott Laboratories, to sell the government-owned GIHOC Pharmaceuticals to Abbott.)
This policy of firing the editors of state-owned newspapers when they disagreed with the government was also applied to me personally in 1970 by the government led by Prime Minister Dr K A Busia. As editor of the Daily Graphic, I had criticised Dr Busia’s proposal to enter into a “dialogue” with the practitioners of the obnoxious system of apartheid (racial discrimination) in South Africa.
In more recent years, Tommy Thompson and John Kugblenu of the Free Press were imprisoned by the PNDC and each died shortly after being released. Many other outspoken journalists thought it wise to leave the country.
We can now heave a sigh of relief and pray that we never enter into eras of oppression against journalists again.
By CAMERON DUODU