On most days, you don’t need to be a cynic to wonder what the Ghana media are about; if you belong to the old school, you are almost tempted to hanker after the bad old days of government controls and limited information. At least, someone was in charge. Now, it feels like a free for all football match being played on a dangerous pitch in an unruly neighbourhood without a referee. To say that people are falling out of love with the media is to deliver a huge understatement.
However, there are days and moments that remind us of the media’s ability to generate good results, and hence the indispensability of the free and independent media in any progressive society. I identify such a moment in Citi FM’s current War on Indiscipline Campaign which focuses on traffic infractions and other forms of indiscipline on our roads. The campaign is currently in the second phase which concentrates on practical traffic policing and arrest and prosecution of offenders.
By the second day of the campaign more than forty offenders had been prosecuted with most of them pleading guilty and accepting to pay their fines of between six hundred and 780 cedis. From the way the police have responded to the campaign, the number of prosecutions could well quadruple as you read this article.
The import of this campaign is that journalism can cause change if it is focused and determined. Just think about it. Quantitatively nothing has changed. There has been no increase in the number of police or the number dedicated to checking traffic. As far as we can tell, no new money has been allocated to the police to give them the extra vim to do their work. What has happened is that a conscientious media outfit decided to use its vast and long reach to do something good, and already we can see the sprouts of change, as far as traffic violations are concerned.
The late American singer and poet, Jim Morrison hit it right on the nail when he observed that “whoever controls the media, controls the mind”. In that context, the media defines what we do with our minds and hence our actions. In a media landscape dominated by politics and propaganda, it is no surprise that the citizens have been numbed to the point of being complicit in our own victimisation.
Let me use this selfsame traffic situation as an example. We are all victims of a traffic situation that poses threats to our health and wellbeing as well as national prosperity. In Accra, people such as myself, spend at least five hours in traffic going to work and back every day. Much of the awful traffic in Accra and other cities and big towns is created by drivers who out of malice or ignorance – mostly both – decide to drive or ride badly because the bad behavior would work for them. We see daily drivers driving on the road shoulder, big cars barreling down the middle of the road, self-important people with sirens shrieking, motorbike riders in kamikaze mode. We endure all of this in silence because we lack the collective voice to speak out; more importantly, we don’t know where to direct our voices even when we find them.
This is where the media can and should step in. In Ghana, we like to recall the phrase of the media as the fourth estate of the realm; we don’t often remind ourselves that the media are also the voice of the voiceless. This last description does not define “voiceless” as only poor and vulnerable people. A whole nation voices.
We pride ourselves on having a free media. Yes, our media are largely free of government controls but the owners and operators have defined freedom to mean their own narrow and political interests. A few weeks ago, I commented on a report of an Afrobarometer survey which found that 57 percent of Ghanaians no longer support the independent media. As I surmised in that piece, people do not see the benefit of the freedoms, which could explain why they have fallen out of love with the media.
The Citi News intervention is a good idea but it must aim to mobilise the public behind it. In the past two years, we have seen the remarkable work of the media campaign against galamsey; by working together it has raised the profile of the issue and given it traction beyond what could be achieved by media houses working individually. However, despite the many public forums, the issue vastly remained a media issue. The reason is that galamsey happens not at Adabraka or Kwadaso in Accra and Kumasi respectively. Galamsey happens in places far away from the urban elite, the shakers and movers of national action.
The Citi campaign has no such drawback. It is a city issue, and already citizens have gotten involved by taking and sending photos and reports of errant drivers and bad driving. Citi must enlist other media houses to get involved. It must create a digital space for people to send photos and information, possibly on Facebook and Instagram. The nation must embrace this War against Indiscipline because driving indiscipline is the public face of the malaise.
We cannot address this subject without naming the public bribe-taking by traffic police as a major cause of the problem. Drivers have neither fear nor respect for the traffic police because they know that the cost of misbehavior is a couple of cedis changing hands. This must be addressed as part of the solution.
Well done Citi News Campaign Team
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Kwasi Gyan Apenteng
kgapenteng@gmail.com