Media practitioner and governance expert, Benjamin Offei-Addo has cautioned against the negative attitude of successive political oppositions towards government initiatives, describing it as unproductive.
In a keynote address during an international political communication conference at the University of Media, Arts and Communication (UniMAC) on Friday, the media advocate said opposition parties made it a point of promising to cancel ongoing programmes by the incumbent administration in an attempt to win public support.
He said the entrenched position to oppose everything the government brought on board was a concerning flaw in Ghana’s democracy.
“So long as people are in opposition, anything a government does is wrong and so they will deliberately devise disinformation to make any activity of government look very bad.
“And what that does is; We move a step forward and two steps back nothing by way of initiatives gets to be sustained because while the are in opposition everything that is being done is bad. If you vote for us we are going to change it so we don’t have continuity when it comes to our national development,” he bemoaned during his speech.
He characterized it as a dangerous situation if such behaviour were allowed to go unaddressed.
During his address, Mr. Offei-Addo was constitutional and legislative reforms to empower the National Media Commission to regulate the media space.
He proposed that as part of conditions for renewal of licenses, the NMC be mandated to appoint an individual to the board of each media company whose job would be to assess the content sent out there for public consumption by the organisation.
He also called for an “objective standard” to be followed by the NMC in order that media organisations are not arbitrarily targeted for disqualification.
