GJA has lost its feel-good factor, credibility – PRINPAG ex-VP

Journalists no longer feel as good about the Ghana Journalists Association as they did in the days when it was led by the likes of Gifty Afenyi Dadzie and Kabral Blay Amihere, a former vice president of the Private Newspapers and Online News Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG), Mr David Tamakloe, has observed.

Discussing Ghana’s media landscape on Class91.3FM’s morning show to mark World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday, 3 May 2023, Mr Tamakloe, who is the editor of WhatsUP News, told Korku Lumor: “I think that over the years, the GJA has lost that stage – the stage where it is seen as a body that speaks for journalists across the board, [as] an association that seeks the welfare of media practitioner – I think that stage has been lost and over the years, there have been issues about credibility”.


“I mean, you saw, recently, the issues about the GJA elections, so, most of the journalists don’t feel about the GJA the way we used to when the likes of Gifty Afenyi Dadzie and Kabral Blay [Amihere] were in charge”, Mr Tamakloe told Lumor.

In his view, journalists, in the past, “felt good to be members of the association but it is no longer like that”.



On the same show, a fellow discussant, Dr Abena Yeboah-Banin, of the Communications Studies Department of the University of Ghana, surmised that the umbrella body for journalists may have lost its lustre as a result of a clash of different political ideologies of the leaders.

“I think, perhaps, part of what has happened with the GJA is the infiltration of positioning and ideology because if this person is in charge and I belong to this camp and I think he belongs to that camp, everything he is doing is wrong and that’s why it’s problematic”, she observed.

In her view, the wearing of ideological lenses by journalists must be done with some finesse so as not to colour everything with politics.

“So, doing it by itself is not problematic if we are critical-minded as a people, it’s not that much of a big deal because you should be able to see my content and say: ‘This is how I’m interpreting it’, but we’re too, sometimes, crass about our political leanings and how we want to wear it that we just let it colour everything”, she decried, explaining: “So, where reason must prevail – somebody says ‘a good reason must always give way to a better reason’ – even when we’ve met a better reason than ours, because of our colouring, we insist that our position must be the one that holds sway and eventually, it infiltrates into all kinds of angles”.

“I mean, look at the challenges these two gentlemen [Mr Tamakloe and Mr Elvis Darko, editor of The Finder newspaper] are raising about the GJA and they are supposed to be members, but if it’s gotten to that place, it means that even when a certain law is to be promulgated to protect journalists, the voices that should feed that law have become divided and, so, it’s going to be: ‘Is it going to help the NPP agenda or is it going to help the NDC agenda?’” Dr Yeboah-Banin noted.

In such circumstances, she said “the core journalist who needs protecting, is being sacrificed in the midst of all this drama we are doing with politics”.