ghananlpcommunity/ghana-gov-speeches-sentences huggingface dataset:
We must never forget that the people of Ghana have chosen us to represent their wishes and best interests.
It is the reason we would be initiating important governance reforms and sometimes initiating severe measures in the next four years to reset our nation and bring it back on track as the black star of Africa.
The journey will not be smooth because the outgoing government has plunged our dear nation into an abyss.
However, we are determined to work together with you to build the Ghana we want.
We know we shall win!
We intend to work to restore the shattered conﬁdence in our politics and governance arrangements.
This election and its outcome represent an opportunity for a new beginning and as we begin to write this new chapter of our collective story, we need to consciously set the tone for the new direction in which we will be travelling.
“My Brothers and Sisters” I want those words to be a reminder to all of you - a reminder to me - and to every individual who has just been elected or re-elected that no matter what oﬃce you hold, no matter what your political aﬃliaDon is or has been in the past, the one thing we share in common is this nation.
It is that WE WANT a much better Ghana.
WE WANT a Ghana that works for everybody, not just a few.
WE WANT a Ghana that considers the well-being of all her citizens and aﬀords them each the ability to live a life of dignity, a life of limitless opportunities.
My Brothers and Sisters, From the kayayei to the managing directors, to the market women, the bankers, the teachers, security personnel, nurses and doctors, the pastors and drivers, tailors, and seamstresses - we are ALL essential to the functioning and forward motion of this country.
We, the PEOPLE of this soil—sons and daughters, brothers and sisters— are, in fact, the GREATEST resource that Ghana has.
This country, this land, is not for one person, for one family, for one tribe or ethnic group.
This country, this beautiful, resilient, and resource-rich country that we so love, Ghana, is for all of us.
But it is not enough to be born here and to die here.
We must also be able to LIVE here with saDsfacDon.
We must be able to love, dream, laugh, eat, dance, drum and share all aspects of the culture that was handed down to us.
And to do that, we must create sustainable and well-paying jobs through the 24-hour economy initiative.
Our most basic needs must be met—aﬀordable housing and healthcare, food and clean water, safe work, and fair wages.
My Brothers and Sisters, it is with tremendous humility that I accept this clear mandate that you, the good people of Ghana, have given me to lead this great nation as your next President.
Every vote that was cast in this election carried the same WEIGHT.
Every vote also carried a HOPE for the future of our country.
I promise you that I will assemble and lead a government that will carry the WEIGHT of those HOPES and dreams, whether you voted for me or not because every victory is a victory for the people—ALL of the people.
Each Dme we have FREE and FAIR elections, and then conduct a smooth transfer of power, it reaﬃrms that our history of leadership and trailblazing was NOT an aberration.
It is NOT by accident that we were the ﬁrst nation in Black Africa to win our independence from colonial rule.
It is NOT by accident that the ﬁrst Black person to serve as the UN Secretary-General, the late Koﬁ Annan, was a Ghanaian.
It is NOT by accident that so many Ghanaians are out in the world blazing new trails and being recognized as leaders in their industries.
Despite being a relatively small nation, Ghana has been and continues to be a MIGHTY force on the world stage.
We are a PROUD people, and we have EVERY reason to be.
When GHANA rises, we all STAND tall and RISE with her.
Africa rises!
Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank you, the good people of Ghana, once more.
I know that many of you are feeling frustration and anger, but I ask you today, please do NOT give in to negativity and pessimism.
There have been reports of acts of vandalism at some government facilities and installations.
I urge you not to vent your frustration in a criminal enterprise, we must channel your anger and frustration into the positive enterprise of resetting and rebuilding our beloved nation.
Let us maintain AND even MAGNIFY this joy and positivity we feel.
We have arrived at THIS moment because so many of you believed that CHANGE was possible.
And now we KNOW that not only is CHANGE possible, but it is also ALREADY in process.
Let us continue to believe that we are ALREADY moving toward the Ghana we want, the Ghana of our hopes and dreams.
And IN this Ghana, where we have turned a NEW chapter and are setting a NEW tone, our BEST days are NOT behind us.
My Brothers and Sisters, Our BEST days are AHEAD of us.
Forward ever!
May God bless you, and may God continue to bless our homeland Ghana.
Chairperson, Professor Audrey Gadzekpo; the Chief Policy Analyst at the Ghana Institute for Public Policy Options, Dr.
Charles Wereko-Brobbey; distinguished audience, ladies and gentlemen.
When Mr.
John Agyekum Kufuor was sworn into office as the second president of the Fourth Republic in 2001, I was busy preparing for my Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in Kete-Krachi.
I was still in journalism school when he left office in 2009.
For this reason, I did not have a close interaction with that administration and its officials.
However, my internship with Ghana Television in 2007 gave me the opportunity to cover a few official assignments involving top officials such as ministers of state.
It was one of such assignments that left me with the first of two most enduring memories of the late Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, who was Ghana’s Minister of Finance and Economic Planning at the time.
It was a programme at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel.
After the function, Mr.
Baah-Wiredu spent time going around to share pleasantries with the journalists as if they were his colleagues.
For me, it was rare.
Journalists often go to the top officials, but in his case, the reverse was the case.
The second incident that had him etched in my mind for years happened at the outer car park of GBC when he came there one blistering afternoon to wait for some journalists with whom he was travelling to Tema for a programme.
I had helped my senior colleagues to the car park and the minister came out of his saloon car to welcome them before takeoff.
In our part of the world where a call to serve in political office and the title honourable appear to confer supernatural status on most people, the likes of Mr Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu of the Kufuor era, Dr Victor Bampoe of the John Mahama era and Dr Yaw Osei Adu Twum of the Akufo-Addo administration are shining examples people who serve in high political offices without parting ways with decency and respect for the people they serve.
I therefore feel highly privileged to be delivering a lecture that celebrates the memory of Mr.
Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, a man many say, served with integrity.
I’m grateful to the Ghana Institute for Public Policy Options for this honour.
Madam Chairperson, I was less than eight years old when the Fourth Republic began in 1993.
I have only been a journalist for ten out of the almost 28 years of the Fourth Republic.
My first reaction upon receipt of the invitation to deliver this lecture was, therefore, to question my own capacity for such a huge task.
I was however encouraged by the wisdom of our elders who say that the size of an animal does not matter; what matters is the taste of its soup.
I have uncovered some of the biggest corruption scandals in the Fourth Republic involving some of the most powerful people and businesses.
What I am about to share with you, therefore, will not only be what I have read or heard but also what I have done, lived, and experienced in the Ghanaian media’s fight against corruption.
Corruption in Ghana President John Agyekum Kufuor came into office with the solemn declaration of “Zero Tolerance for Corruption”.
He is often quoted to have said that, corruption was as old as Adam.
It is important to state that corruption in Ghana did not begin in the Fourth Republic.
In fact, it started before the first republic.
Corruption was here when our nation was still called Gold Coast and ruled by the colonialists.
The Aiken Watson Commission of Enquiry which was set up to investigate the disturbances that led to the killing of some ex-servicemen in the Gold Coast in February 1948, could not ignore the issue of corruption in its report.
Corruption was not part of the Commission’s terms of reference, neither was it a cause of the disturbances.
The Commission however noted corruption in its report.
The report said: “It would be idle to ignore the existence of bribery and corruption in many walks of life in the Gold Coast admitted to us by every responsible African to whom we addressed the question.
That it may spread as further responsibility devolves upon the African is a possibility which cannot be denied.
No nation can rise to greatness upon any such foundations.
It is a challenge, therefore, to the Gold Coast Africans to set their house in order and a challenge which we believe will be taken up under the weight of responsibility.
In any event, in our view, its existence cannot be accepted as a barrier on the road to self-government.”
The Watson Commission was prophetically right.
Corruption did not stop us from fighting for and getting self-government.
But corruption as predicted by the Commission, spread like an incurable pandemic when we took over the responsibility of running our nation.
We did not put our house in order and corruption has definitely stopped our country from rising to greatness as the Commission predicted 72 years ago.
Today, we cannot undertake any major project or implement a policy without going to beg or borrow from nations, some of which are less endowed with human and natural resources than us.
These debts sinking our nation, are monies that have been borrowed to finance the ever-growing corruption industry.
Corruption has put the gear of our development on the reverse.
It has hurt and continues to threaten the survival of our democratic experiment and will one day set this country ablaze as has been the case in the past if we don’t tame it.
After independence, corruption was the basis for the many military uprisings that became a disturbing rhythm in our political space until sanity prevailed in 1992, when we opted for the ballots instead of bullets in determining how long a government stays in power.
However, the corruption that was used as the basis to kill former heads of state and military generals and resulted in the confiscation of assets and meting out of severe punishment to people in the 1970s will pale into insignificance when compared with what is experienced today.
In Ghana today, we worship money without questioning its source.
In our churches, those who pay tithes with bags of cash are the ones who grace the front pews.
In many parts of the world, businessmen and women find solutions to society’s problems and profit from that.
Here, many of the top business people are those who rather find problems for society and profit from the problems.
They are called smart because of their ability to cut corners.
To them, the end justifies the means, so they steal their way high up and spend the rest of their lives concocting stories to convince us how they made it.
If you make your money genuinely, you do not need to convince anyone about its source.
In discussing corruption, we often think of only politicians, but I dare say some of the most corrupt people in this country are not into politics.
Putting emphasis on the political class is, however, not misplaced because the politicians, when in office, have the power to curb corruption.
They also control a chunk of the nation’s resources.
What a thousand extremely corrupt policemen or women can extort by way of “road duty allowance” in their lifetime cannot match the kickback from a single contract awarded by a political office holder.
The fecal matter of one elephant, our elders have noted, is definitely heavier than the combined effort of a million mosquitoes with acute diarrhea.
Corruption in the Fourth Republic Due to the excessive monetisation of our politics, the stakes in political corruption at the national level are higher than ever before in our nation’s history.
Last Sunday, an Executive Member of the Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council, Bishop Samuel Noi Mensah said at a forum organized by Joy FM that since 1992, the beginning of the fourth republic, every successive government has been more corrupt than the previous government.
What this means is that the current administration is the most corrupt in the Fourth Republic.
His observation, as sad as it is, represents the reality for many Ghanaians who are concerned about the turn of events in the last few years.
I started my investigative journalism in the John Mahama era and by 2016, I was convinced that the John Mahama administration was the most corrupt government in the fourth republic, and perhaps, in the history of Ghana.
I said to some colleagues that no government could ever be half as corrupt as the Mahama administration.
It didn’t take long for the Akufo-Addo administration to show me how naïve I had been.
Mahama’s worst ranking on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index is better than Akufo-Addo’s best ranking.
And I dare say the corruption reality index might even be worse than the perception.
In this election, corruption is not a major subject for the two major political parties.
This is unusual but understandable.
Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP won the 2016 election with a sustained anti-corruption campaign and the fact that the party cannot campaign on corruption says much about reality on the ground.
The NDC, on the other hand, lost the moral right to campaign on corruption back in 2016 so what is often the main rallying point for change is missing in our political campaigns.
Some have argued that the perception of corruption is high in the Fourth Republic because of the vibrant media landscape.
For instance, President Mahama in one of his presidential encounters with the media explained that the perception of corruption in his government was fueled by the media exposures.
To him and other government officials, the perception of corruption was higher than the reality.
That school of thought holds the view that the freer the media, the higher the perception of corruption.
In June 2018, when I visited the headquarters of Transparency International in Berlin, I interviewed the researchers who compiled the annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI) about the correlation between free media and the perception of corruption.
They explained that it was untrue that the freer the media, the higher the perception of corruption.
I also compared the corruption perception index with the press freedom index and found an interesting correlation that debunks the explanation often offered by government officials here.
In 2016, for instance, the 20 best ranked countries in the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders also featured prominently in the 20 best ranked countries by Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index.
Out of the 20 best ranked countries in media freedom, 16 of them were among the 20 best ranked (the 20 least corrupt countries) in Transparency International’s CPI.
Countries that rank badly in press freedom tend to rank poorly in corruption perception because corruption and the repression of free speech are both products of bad governance.
There are a few exceptions such as Rwanda and Singapore which rank very poorly in press freedom but rank well in corruption perception index because their governments are committed to fighting corruption.
Ghana is also one such outlier, which has good press freedom ranking but ranks poorly in corruption perception.
This calls for critical interrogation because our elders have taught us that if a man with healthy teeth chews his food awkwardly, one must be sure there is sand in it.
Part of the sand is the failure of the media in the performance of their watchdog function.
The Media as Check on Arms of Government In the words of Albert Kan Dapaah, the Minister for National Security, a democracy without checks and balances is worse than a dictatorship.
Back in Junior and Senior High Schools, we were taught that the separation of powers of the executive, legislature, and judiciary was meant to ensure checks and balances.
In practice, the legislature appears to be a puppet of the executive, and the judiciary is yet to give the average Ghanaian enough reason to believe that it has a mind of its own and will not succumb to the overwhelming powers and influence of the executive.
The framers of the 1992 constitution, perhaps, knew this would happen, so they empowered the media to hold these arms of government accountable to the people.
Article 162 (5) of the constitution states: “All agencies of the mass media shall, at all times, be free to uphold the principles, provisions and objectives of this Constitution, and shall uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people of Ghana.”
The media in Ghana lived through a long period of repression until in 1992, when the constitution gave it freedom.
Media organisations have seen an exponential growth since 1992.
From only the state broadcaster at the inception of the Fourth Republic, Ghana now has close to 400 radio stations and tens of television stations.
The internet has enabled hundreds of news portals to compete with the newspapers for attention.
The important question, however, is whether beyond the numbers, the media have been effective in the fight against corruption.
This is the question I will attempt answer.
I also intend to share with you, what I believe are detrimental to the media’s fight against corruption and the way forward.
At the onset of the Fourth Republic, journalists were more aggressive with their new-found freedom and the fight against corruption and human rights abuses was a cherished virtue.
Newspapers such as The Chronicle, The Enquirer, The Crusading Guide, and to some extent, The Palaver are examples of media entities that did fearless journalism.
Newspapers at the time found satisfaction in the quest to outpace one another in unravelling scandals and making people and institutions accountable.
The state-owned media have never been truly independent and have therefore lacked the ability to be critical of government.
Private radio and television stations were late entrants to Ghana’s media industry.
They came in the Fourth Republic but a few of them still contributed to the fight against corruption.
In the last ten years; however, the number of media houses committed to the fight against corruption in Ghana has dwindled.
One media organization that has been consistent in fighting corruption through investigative journalism is the Multimedia Group, specifically Joy FM and JoyNews TV.
I am mindful of the important and consistent anti-corruption investigations conducted by Tiger Eye Private investigations.
However, the emphasis is on media organisations that initiate such stories.
If you ask me how the media has performed in the fight against corruption in the Fourth Republic, I will say it is below average.
Out of ten, I will award three marks for the effort of the media.
It is getting worse by the day and critical journalism is dying.
Ask any Ghanaian to name the investigative journalists we have in this country and they will not count beyond the fingers on one hand.
Why Media Have Failed to Properly Fight Corruption The reasons the media are failing in their fight against corruption are many but I will mention a few of those I consider to be most important.
In Twi, it is said, “Sɛ ɔkɔtɔ wea, na neba nso wea a, hena na obɛgye ne nyɔnko taataa?”
If both the crab and its offspring crawl, then who will help the other to walk?
Martin Luther King Junior put it differently when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness.”
The corruption that is sinking our society has not spared the media.
The actions of some journalists and media houses encourage acts of corruption.
In some cases, individual journalists who cannot resist the temptation look the other way while the rot continues.
At times, the problem is the media owners who refuse to publish the corruption stories.
In 2013, we lost one of the finest journalists in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, Samuel Agyemang of Metro TV.
Samuel did a good investigative work on Subah Infosolutions but was stopped from airing it on Metro TV, where he worked.
He had to publish it on YouTube and resigned afterward.
He later recounted what he went through on Facebook.
Any journalist who wants to fight corruption in Ghana would soon realise that their fiercest opponents are their fellow journalists, who for one reason or the other would fight on the side of the those stealing from the state.
In 2017, I published an investigative series titled “Robbing the Assemblies” in which I revealed fraudulent sanitation contracts that had robbed the nation and the assemblies hundreds of millions of cedis.
It was this investigation that revealed that a bin liners contract that was supposed to cost 900,000 cedis less than one million cedis was awarded to the Jospong Group for more than 64 million cedis.
This investigation resulted in the cancellation of a 74 million-dollar contract.
However, not many in the media were enthused that I had gone back to the Zoomlion stable after first visiting it in the 2013 GYEEDA Scandal.
The Ghana Journalists Association to which I belonged issued a statement against that investigative work, saying I should not destroy a Ghanaian business.
The most disturbing part of it was that the GJA did not state a single ethical breach in that investigation.
The morning after that press statement, there was a call from Zoomlion to one of my colleagues at Joy FM, where I worked, asking him to table the GJA press statement for discussion on the Super Morning Show.
Joy FM did not do it but the GJA’s support for Zoomlion against its own member made the front pages of many newspapers and enjoyed enormous reviews.
It took the anti-corruption civil society organisations and the Media Foundation for West Africa to come to my defense.
Professor Audrey Gadzekpo, who is chairing this ceremony condemned the GJA, saying it had become a victim of corporate capture.
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, another reason the media have not been strong in the fight against corruption is the lack of protection for investigative or anti-corruption journalists.
Whoever engages in the fight against corruption takes on a dangerous venture, whether the person is a journalist, politician, or a civil society activist.
Nigeria's former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has written a book titled, “Fighting Corruption Is Dangerous”.
In that book, she recounts how her 83-year-old mother was kidnapped in 2012 by forces who objected to some of the government's anti-corruption reforms she was championing.
They asked her to resign on live TV before they could leave her mother.
She refused and her mother escaped miraculously from the kidnappers.
Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, who was the minister of Youth and Sports when the GYEEDA scandal broke recounted his ordeal in 2018, saying he nearly lost his life for supervising the GYEEDA Committee’s work and overseeing some of the actions that were taken on the report.
If the Minister who did not break the story faced danger, then one can imagine the journalist who broke the scandal that resulted in the loss of jobs, cancellation of contracts, collapse of companies, the imprisonment of people and other consequences.
The threat facing investigative journalists in Ghana is enormous.
It has always been there but it has heightened in the past four years because the body language of the Akufo-Addo administration is that of viciousness and intolerance.
I have never felt so unsafe as a journalist and many of my colleagues share safety concerns because of recent events.