Holding State Institutions Accountable in 2011 (GSS & GTV)

Everybody says 2011 will be an interesting year.

Aside from individual resolutions, which usually border on personal morality
and lifestyle changes, institutions and organisations have been prolific
these last few days in flooding the air with various brands of promises,
prophecies, professions, prognoses, and ... threats.

We also want to jump into the fray, the dutiful citizens that we are.

2011 shall be the year we at IMANI focuses on public institutions as part of
our broader emphasis on the quality of socio-economic policymaking.

We are launching the “Count Me” campaign today, so that the first week of
January 2011 can be adequately devoted to popularising the concerns of the
hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians who apparently were neglected during the
national census.

The anecdotal evidence makes nonsense of the claim by the Ghana Statistical
Service (GSS) that 90% of the population were reached. Does that mean that
the Service already had a pre-determined figure in mind? How then did they
come up with the 90% figure? If they used statistical techniques to produce
the said percentage, can they kindly share the details of those
extrapolations?

At any rate, we dispute the figure.

Many of the people we know assure us that they were not counted. A sizable
number of these people live in some of the best laid out parts of our most
affluent cities. If these folks remained unreached at the end of the census,
can we sanely assume that the millions of Ghanaians living in the poor and
decaying suburbs of our crumbling urban centres and in the remote
extremities of rural Ghana were counted?

The census was an extremely important exercise. The numeration of citizenry
was only one aspect of a complex process designed to support policymaking
with good quality data. Given how badly the enumeration exercise went, one
can hardly be confident about the other components of the exercise. And yet,
our ability to measure many factors regarding our socio-economic
circumstances, performance and progress will be dependent on the exercise.

As we enter the dying stages of the compilation, review and analysis phase,
it is imperative that pressure be brought to bear on the Ghana Statistical
Service to depart from their usual manner. The hand-waving, axiom-bandying,
and jargon-spewing should end. Otherwise a time shall come, and some believe
that time is already here, when their data would be routinely ignored by a
savvy market and discarded at every turn in the vital decision-making that
goes on in the private sectors of our economy where wealth-creation actually
happens.

We urge all Ghanaians who were neglected in the census, if they see this
article or hear about it, to go to our website: *
http://www.imanighana.org/?q=node/195 *and fill in a brief form. We shall
convert the data we collect into petition format and appeal to
decision-making institutions to review the conduct of the census, to the
extent that it is relevant to their functions, and strive to make amends
where possible.

Our tolerance for deficiency as a country and as citizenry cannot increase
any more beyond its present unacceptable level. We have been treading a
dangerous path wherein the worst excesses of institutional incompetence, so
long as cheap political points cannot be scored therefrom, are excused in
the misguided notion that a developing country should not expect value for
money from those to whom scarce resources are entrusted to produce a
difference in the lives of the long suffering masses.

And in that regard, can we spare some remarks for Ghana Television (GTV),
the terrestrial broadcasting unit of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation
(GBC).

That particular unit of the GBC is no longer a bonafide public broadcaster.

They have fallen far short of the glory – however attenuated by limited
resources – of Ghana Radio (and here, we must bestow some of our rare praise
for the Affail Monneys and Owusu Addos of that world) and their cousin
institution the Ghana New Agency.

This is an institution that has developed a bizarre and arbitrary notion of
what deserves to be treated as “relevant to public interest”. Unless an
event, episode or development passes this dubious test, GTV insists on being
paid more than a thousand dollars before providing “coverage”. Is this
public interest broadcasting?

We call on the National Media Commission to institute prompt investigations
into this conduct in order to fully evaluate the tenability of the state
broadcaster’s criteria for covering events and developments in this country.
Increasingly its news and current events programming and portfolio of
products have grown insipid, inward-looking and thus much less educational
and informative than can be deemed acceptable by any objective Ghanaian.

As an institution “subvented” through taxation and partly funded by
compulsory television licenses, its attitude to its duties and the far from
satisfactory fare it serves cannot be justified on any basis. No doubt they
have taken shelter behind the lack of a credible viewer ratings system in
Ghana to evade accountability.

But there is no doubt that the broadcaster has been bleeding resources and
losing audience share to more responsive broadcasters for quite a while now.
What specific use is their denuded mandate then? Why do we need them if
other free-to-air broadcasters are offering superior coverage of events of
importance in this country, and saving us precious tax money?

If our money wasn’t being used to subsidise this farce, they would have been
at liberty to perpetuate their eccentricities all they want. But with tax
money they daren’t.

* *

*Courtesy of IMANI-Ghana (**www.imanighana.org*
*) and Africanliberty.org*