Veteran journalist, Elizabeth Ohene claims, contrary to business mogul Sam Jonah’s assertion that the region is slowly drifting into a lifestyle of silence, the opposite is true.
The prolific author said in her newest articles or blog posts that the place in the previous handful of several years has been hit with a barrage of cacophony on countrywide airwaves “so substantially so we just cannot hear just one a different.”
This, she refers to as a “culture of sounds.”
“The individuals of Ghana have taken President Akufo-Addo at his term that they should really be lively citizens and everybody has anything to say on every thing. Absolutely everyone looks certain he is right and has the respond to to our difficulties,” she reported.
This, she reported, has fueled intolerance not just from the political course, but also from the common Ghanaian who engages in public discourse.
“Those who see them selves as experts are considerably more intolerant of being challenged than anybody else,” she said.
She added that equally the govt and the standard public have a appropriate to problem views that oppose theirs, and in the procedure of authorities challenging a check out that dissents from their own held views, it should not be tagged as perpetuating a lifestyle of silence.
“Who states that journalists can not get things completely wrong? Who claims CSOs don’t have their very own interests that they seek out to defend and who claims they are constantly ideal? Who states academics simply cannot get items erroneous and why must difficult them be found as intolerance?
“Why should it be that individuals in authorities or in Parliament or members of the judiciary can get things improper and be told as a lot but if you disagree with their critics, then you are intolerant?”
According to the NPP stalwart, Sam Jonah’s statements of a tradition of silence preserving are unfounded.
“I counsel the issue we have is that there is way too significantly sounds,” she concluded.
Her comments have been in response to a speech shipped by Sam Jonah at a Rotary Club event in Accra wherever he stated that journalists, lecturers etcetera. had been currently being gagged by governing administration and government supporters for their dissenting sights.
Sam Jonah experienced stated that the pervading silence was as a final result “of the deep partisan polarisation of our region this kind of that everything is viewed via the lenses of politics.
“It seems to me that the culture of silence has returned. This time not enforced by authorized and military electric power but via comfort, parochialism, hypocrisy and absence of conviction. Exactly where are our Adu Boahens and PV ANSAHs?”
