The Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa, Sulemana Braimah has slammed the Minister for Communications Ursula Owusu-Ekuful for trying to flex her muscles by writing directly to GBC to shut down three of its channels on Digital Terrestrial Television platform.
Speaking on the Morning Starr Thursday, he noted that the letter should have been directed to the National Media Commission (NMC) who exercises supervision and control over the state broadcaster.
According to him, a democracy where ministers can just give directives to independent entities that are not within their remit must be discouraged. He firmly stated that Mrs Ursula Ekuful is not a court of law to give that directive to the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.
“So, why wouldn’t the minister write to the NMC to draw the attention of the commission to the fact that ‘this is the challenge we are having and therefore this is the decision that we are proposing that is taken to ensure that GBC at least gives us one or two of its channels.’ Rather than writing directly to GBC as a directive and asking them to consolidate all their programmes on six channels, to three channels within 60 days, why, are you a court?” he chided.
Mr Braimah added “I don’t think we should live in a democracy where ministers can give such directives to entities that are not within their remit and entities that are supposed to be independent and managed by independent institutions.”
“Otherwise if we go on like this, next time what we will hear will be that ‘GBC don’t broadcast this content, broadcast that content. Remove this editorial and put this person there.’ I don’t think that is how we build democracy and I don’t think that is how we want to build public service broadcasting,” he said.
Source: GhanaFeed.com