NPP urges govt to come clean on media fund
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has called on the government to come clean on the disbursement of the media fund by the Ministry of Information and constitute a board of trustees to administer the fund.
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It also asked all media professionals and well-meaning Ghanaians to seek justice and fair distribution of the media fund.
The party made the call in a statement signed by Mr Perry Okudzeto, the acting Director of Communications, and issued in Accra last Wednesday.
The statement said what seemed to be a good idea when the government announced the creation of a media fund with an initial Gh¢1 million to help the development of the media in Ghana was now turning to be one of the many avenues for misappropriating public funds.
“Initially, the Government’s response to media reports was that the media fund was uninitialised. But when answering questions in Parliament on it, the Minister of Information said that the budgeted money for the year 2011 was used to purchase laptops for journalists,” it said.
According to the statement, further explanations by the Information Minister and his deputies were at variance and also to the effect that though the laptops were purchased, only 140 were given to the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) and the rest distributed to Information Service Department workers, parliamentary assistants and others.
“What is even more worrying is the denial by the Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association (GIBA) of receiving any money or laptop from the Ministry of Information,” it pointed out.
It said the problem with the handling of the media fund raised a number of serious issues, including who purchased the laptops and at what price and whether or not the procurement law was followed.
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The statement said the fetish of spending every available resource the government has on laptops must stop.
“It is becoming a ritual in our country today what our resources will be expended on at the least opportunity when some resource is made available to the government”.