<<Print>>Since I joined the journalism profession over a decade ago, I have never dreamt or wanted to ever report from the OSU Castle or the Flagstaff house.
Not because I don’t have the capacity or the ability to do it but because I can’t keep my mouth shut on certain things that I see or hear.
I remember very well, former president John Evans Atta Mills during his last visit to the Upper West before he met his untimely death, one of his Aides commanded members of the presidential Press Corps at the Wa Senior High Technical School to run because they were late and the president was already there waiting for them.
I was using a motorbike with a senior colleague and was not on the bus that was used by the press corps. We arrived at the Wa Senior High Technical school park and parked in front of the bus of the press corps when this Aide came with the ‘fatwa’.
I asked one of them why should they take instruction from an aide? He told me ‘‘Salam, you don’t know the problems we are facing, if I don’t run, he will remove my name from the list of the press corps’’. He then took to his heels.
The information did not have its intended effect of getting me to hurry up. I even reverted to walking at a snail’s pace, the aide became furious and asked whether I wasn’t part of the press in the region.
Taking a cue from the local saying that it is only women who don’t fear chiefs, I told him that I am but do not take instructions from a presidential aide to run after assignments.
The aide looked at me, breathed and traipsed away. For me, I don’t know him and have no intention of trying to know who this muscularly built man was.
I am a village reporter; I have no dream or any aspiration to ever report from the presidency. So to hell with him.
If you meet members of the presidential corps, they will tell you a lot of frustrations that they encounter daily reporting from the presidency.
Apart from the issue of riding on rented rickety vehicles and expected to move same pace with the V8 Land cruisers, they sometimes got to their destination without any prior arrangement for food or accommodation.
Sometimes they run out of patience and they have to move in to town looking for food like a monkey in a forest looking for banana.
Veering off from the topic and moving to the regions, the situation of journalists covering assignments is even more worrying. Here the minister, Member of Parliament or the DCE will pack journalists like sardines in a double-cabin pickup whose tyres are worn out.
They will only put some few gallons of fuel in it and ask the driver to ‘’manage’’ with that whilst they pack party foot soldiers who have nothing to with the assignments in their Land cruisers and Nissan patrols.
Some even attend assignments on motorbikes riding over hundred kilometers on bumpy roads replete with manholes filled with water.
The only thing absent is the fish, if not, there are more of fishponds than roads. Yet these government functionaries sit in their special utility vehicles with their party apparatchiks and foot soldiers that have nothing to do with the assignment they are going whilst the journalists are left at the mercy of the weather.
Although I have nothing against the presidency, sometimes I think that reporting on issues of crime, and given voice to the voiceless is far more important than following a president whose ‘‘surrogates’’ will never one bit accord you one scintilla of respect.
As my managing news editor, Elvis Kwashie always capped it, the report that wins the awards are not in the presidency but in the communities’’.
For me, if I don’t win any award but I have the belief that my award will be in the heart and minds of the marginalized and voiceless people in my rural Upper West region whose stories I did which changed their lives.
I do not begrudge members of the Presidential Press Corps neither do I envy them seeing the kind of treatment meted out to them but I think that they deserve some modicum of respect from the people they serve.Why can’t they be treated the same way they are treating their own? If they can’t give them V8 Land cruisers to also move with why they can share their V8s with them. I know some of these Land cruisers they ride in carry no one and sometimes at most two persons.
Since the motor accident that involved the president’s press corps last week, which killed the Ghanaian times reporter, Samuel Nuamah, and injuring seven others, tongues have been wagging.
Some people are calling for a probe in the issue which I do not have a problem with, but the question that will remain will be what happens after the investigation? Will the recommendations of the report be implemented to the latter?
Former majority Leader in parliament and now Minister of Defence, Dr. Benjamin Bewa-Nyog Kunbuor, one time in an interview with me says, Ghana lacks critical thinkers who can think and proffer practical solutions to the country's problems.
Instead, he said large numbers of people were paid to talk, hurl insults and invectives at each in the media.
"In this country, we spend so much time paying people to talk, we don't pay people to think; if we pay them at all, we don't pay them well," he stated.
My only prayer for now is that the talk we do now on this issue should not be one for the marines but one that they will be thinking so that we are able to separate the wheat from the chaff for mother Ghana to be the ultimate beneficiary.
What is good for the goose is also good for the gander. Members of the Presidential Press Corps also deserve better.
/The writer, Rafiq Salam, is a broadcast journalist with Joy 99.7FM. His email address is [email protected]