Resource Ghana Broadcasting Corporation-GJA

THE Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) has called on the Government to restructure and resource the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) to enable it to play a more effective public service broadcasting role in the country.
The call was contained in a document submitted by the GJA to the Minister of Information , Mrs Zita Okaikoi, on transforming GBC into a true public service broadcaster in the country in Accra yesterday.
The document was compiled by the GJA with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and KAB Governance Consult after conducting a series of consultation with the public from the middle of 2007 to May 2009.
It recommended, among other things, the need for the Government to transform GBC as the only state-owned broadcasting organisation, especially in the areas of its legal mandate, funding and philosophical outlook.
It also called on the Ministry of Information, which has responsibility over GBC, to actively support the corporation to secure the financial resources towards the restructuring process.
The document requires the state to put in place measures that would mandate all broadcasting stations in the country to undertake a minimum transmission of public service broadcasting.
It asked the Ministry of Information to link up with the National Media Commission (NMC) to provide the required leadership and impetus to transform GBC into a true public service broadcaster for the advancement of the country’s democracy and socio-economic development.
The document further called for the establishment of a public service broadcasting fund to support public service broadcasting in the country.
The sources of the fund should include direct allocation from the Consolidated Fund, a percentage of talk time tax imposed on mobile phone users and a percentage of licence fees paid by prospective radio and television stations for the acquisition of frequencies.
Such a fund, the document indicated, must be insulated from political and commercial interests and should be managed by the NMC.
The President of GJA, Mr Ransford Tetteh, who gave a brief presentation on the document, said the GJA recognised the effective role public service broadcasting played in the consolidation of the country’s democratic culture, hence the need to resource GBC to perform better.
“Public service broadcasting plays an imperative role in the dissemination of information and the provision of a medium for all sections of the society to express their opinion,” he noted.
Mrs Okaikoi, receiving the document, commended the GJA, Friedrich Ebert Foundation and KAB Governance Consult for the initiative, which she said was in line with the Government’s policy of transforming GBC.
She expressed worry that although her ministry spent about 75 per cent of its budgetary allocation on GBC, it was not making the needed impact on the media landscape.
Mrs Okaikoi gave the assurance that as part of the initiative by the Government to transform GBC, the current TV licence fee would soon be increased from 30Gp per annum to GH¢5 per annum.
That, she said, would help mobilise resource towards the restructuring process and called on the management of GBC to clean up the place because “we cannot achieve any result if the current state of work environment is not changed”.
She also called on the members of the public who had not been paying their TV licence fee to do so.