Media must be partners in governance-Veep

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6-10-09

THE Vice-President, Mr John Dramani Mahama, has urged media practitioners to help remove the perception that the media must always assume the role of opponent to the government.
“Africans must learn that the media are partners in governance and not opponents. This will allow for the provision of appropriate legislation that will create the space for freedom of expression and proper training of journalists,” he said.
The Vice-President said this in an address read on his behalf by Mr Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, a Deputy Minister of Information, at the opening of the Africa Media Leadership Conference in Accra yesterday.
According to him, the media should desist from being “agents of conflicts, retrogression and destruction”.
The three-day programme, which is on the theme, “Learning from the future: Africa’s media map in 2029”, is being attended by media owners and representatives from across the continent and the world.
Mr Mahama said the government of Ghana would continue to create an enabling environment where journalists could report freely, critically and responsibly to support the goals of democracy, economic development and human rights.
He said the “standard of journalism can further be enhanced through training, educational seminars and conferences which governments in Africa should encourage and support”.
The present generation, he said, was faced with innumerable challenges, including HIV/AIDS, climate change, natural disasters, drug abuse, money laundering, corruption, political intolerance, election malpractice and ICT fraud.
Mr Mahama said it was against that backdrop that the media, journalists, publishers and media owners had a very crucial role to play in assisting society to face those challenges successfully.
“I want to charge you, as media leaders, to leave the beaten track and your comfort zones and rather seek out new maps, new routes and new destination,” he said, adding that the media were an integral part of modern democratic governance.
The Director of Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership, Mr Francis Mdlongwa, said, “Our long established newspapers, radio and television stations are all facing a new struggle for survival in the emerging digital media platforms that are proliferating every day.”
Those new channels, he said, such as Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Twitter and mobile phones, were taking away large numbers of customers.
“People we used to call listeners, viewers and readers are today increasingly agitating for and are able to be the providers of their own specific news content which they are consuming at their chosen time and place and using their own preferred media platforms,” he said, adding that today’s media audiences were not just producing, selecting and customising their news and information content but also re-defining the role, identity and purpose of journalism and media companies.
The Head of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Sub-Saharan Africa Media Programme, Mr Frank Windeck, said the traditional media dominated the conference when it started.
That, he said, was rapidly changing, as Internet entrepreneurs and bloggers were getting on board, adding, “To prepare the African media for the future, we need to create more networks between the traditional and the modern.”