By Franklin ASARE-DONKOH
Professor Amin Alhassan, Director-General (DG) of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), has appealed to the government to retool the Corporation for effective and efficient public broadcasting.
According to him, there haven’t been any major investments in the corporation for some decades now.
The DG of GBC appealed when the Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament, Rt. Hon. Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin called on the management of the Corporation on Tuesday, July 11, 2023, at the Broadcasting House in Accra.
The Rt. Hon. Speaker’s visit forms part of activities lined up to celebrate the 30th anniversary of uninterrupted parliamentary democracy in Ghana.
The celebration is under the theme “Thirty Years of Parliamentary Democracy Under the Fourth Republic: The Journey Thus Far”.
Mr. Speaker, “We at GBC have done our best with our Internally Generated Fund (IGF) to get some things done to enhance our service delivery, but there are certain types of expenditures that are beyond the threshold of IGF.”
Prof. Alhassan hinted that since 2004 /2005 there hasn’t been any serious capital investment made by the state into GBC in terms of its infrastructure.
He further continued by saying, Rt. Hon. Speaker, “The media space is a fast-changing one, and if we do not retool with the right equipment, we will have to deal with an analogue structure within a digital ecosystem. And this has been our biggest challenge.
We think that critical equipment for transmission and production needs to be acquired and this cannot be achieved with IGF but by direct public investment in GBC.
Especially when you look at our Outside Broadcasting Vans (OBVs), they are so old that they cannot be used for any international production. So anytime GBC has to produce or transmit any event of international stature, the corporation has to hire equipment from private firms at exorbitant rates coated in USD.
Let’s take, for instance, the funeral of the late Kofi Annan, JJ Rawlings, or any other big outdoor event of international stature like the State of the Nation Address (SONA) or sports. We will have to rent equipment.
At one time, when we forced the last OB van to work in parliament, it caught fire, and we had to send it for repairs at a huge cost.”
According to the DG of GBC, every public service broadcaster deserves to have OB vans. Saying we at GBC haven’t had that and the last we have which is an analogue and cannot be used.
We want to say that GBC needs considerable investment in production and transmission equipment, especially OB vans. He reiterated.
Prof. Alhassan said that across the continent, we’ve witnessed how governments have invested in our counterpart institutions, and GBC cannot be left out.
“Rt. Hon. Speaker, across the world, all public service media organisations are funded largely in a form of tax called the public media tax, which we called here in Ghana the TV Licence Fee.
And on this note, Mr. Speaker, the Corporation has re-launched the collection of the TV Licence Fee, and I’m appealing to our Members of Parliament to pay their TV Licence Fee as well as to educate their constituents to also pay promptly to ensure the continuous dissemination of information, especially to remote areas,” he added.