A former Director General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), Professor Kwame Karikari says GBC’s biggest and ‘cancerous’ headache is financing.
Speaking at the 84th Anniversary Lecture of the GBC under the theme, “State of the State Broadcaster” Prof. Kwame Karikari said broadcasting all over the world is expensive and capital intensive. He added that the situation is more so with financing the Public Service.
Prof Karikari said the state of the Public Service is not essentially set up to make profit and hence, the commercial side of the business is often left to the private sector to exploit.
He said TV Licensing is a major component of funding for many Public Service Broadcasters. He noted that whereas it is a criminal offence to default in payment of TV License in other countries, in Ghana however, the collection of the fee has been for decades, a major difficulty.
To help address the issue of financing for GBC, Prof Karikari said government must either repeal the law on TV license fee or find a more acceptable way of collecting it to to help GBC get out of its financial crises.