Ghana government urged to decouple NCA from Communications Ministry
Dr Abena Animwaa Yeboah-Banin, Head of the Department of Communication Studies, University of Ghana, has urged the government to separate the National Communications Authority (NCA) from the Ministry of Communications and Digitilisation.
She said that would reduce the political interference and allow the Authority to effectively discharge its duties.
Speaking on Accra-based Joy FM’s newsfile programme on Saturday, monitored by the Ghana News Agency, Dr Yeboah-Banin expressed concern about the seeming “capture of Ghanaian media” by political actors, who owned about one-third of the Ghanaian media and tried to control the contents.
Dr Yeboah-Banin also called on the NCA to limit the number of frequencies allocated to individuals to ensure diversity.
According to her, about 87 per cent of media audience in the country was controlled by only four media companies, a situation she explained defiled the purpose of media pluralism as stated in the 1992 Constitution.
“I think we are at that point where we need to cap how many frequencies are going into the hands of one person or business,” she stressed.
Professor Amin Alhassan, Director General, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, called for a rethink of the regulatory architecture of the Ghanaian media to ensure that licences were not arbitrarily awarded.
“… The conditions and practices so far tell us that the rules of the game need to be redefined. We need to rethink the regulatory architecture we have in force. ”
He highlighted the need for Ghanaians to resort to established institutions such as the National Media Commission to address any media excesses, instead of the law court.
“It is expected that there will always be media excesses and that is why avenues for seeking redress are always provided,” he said.
Mr Cecil Sunkwa-Mills, President, Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association, said the absence of a broadcasting law was a major concern for the industry.
He, therefore, appealed for the Broadcasting Bill currently before Parliament to be passed into law to regulate and sanitise the broadcasting space.
He also called for a review of taxes within the sector, especially the communication service tax and the authorisation fees to reduce the financial burden on media organisations.
Ms Esther Armah, a former journalist, emphasised the need for media practitioners to be equipped with the requisite skills that would enable them to effectively and efficiently deliver on their mandate.
Such skills, she explained, must be marched with better working conditions, describing the current pay of media practitioners as “woeful”.
Mr Roland Affail Monney, a former President of the Ghana Journalists Association, urged the government to address the frequent attack on journalists, stressing that, Ghana’s press freedom ranking could suffer if such assaults on journalists persisted.
Source: GNA