Thinking Aloud: Berating the media

Yaw Boadu Ayeboafo Thinking Aloud Dec - 03 - 2015 , 12:32

It is sometimes irritating to hear people, who use the media to reach out to the people lambasting and accusing the media of mediocrity when they are unable to have their way. For many months, government officials, especially the Minister of Power, Dr Kwabena Donkor, made Ghanaians believe that the process of fixing the dumsor permanently was through the power barges from Turkey.

So much was focussed on the arrival of the barges that when the first one reached the shores of the country, the people expectantly believed the danger had come to a near close. All we needed was connecting the barge to the national grid, and presto, we would have reliable and consistent power supply.

Instead of the Minister explaining the issues better to the people, he has rather turned against the media as those responsible for over-flogging the idea of the barges as the panacea for dumsor, when it is only a partial solution to the problem. It is as if without any promptings the media by

At what point did the minister detect that the media had needlessly and baselessly created the impression that the focus of the government concerning fixing the power crisis revolved around the power barges? How was the misinformation addressed?

All along, the government has ignored statements to the effect that the problem confronting the power sector is not the lack of capacity but our inability to provide for the crude oil and gas to power existing generating facilities to provide power. Therefore, the quest to secure the services of the power barges was directed at providing capacity. Thus, if Ghanaians have grown to believe that the power barges will provide a permanent solution to the crisis, how does that become a creation of an ignorant media as the minister would want our people to believe? Why has it been difficult for the Ministry to craft an appropriate and effective message to erase the impression that the solution to the problem is the acquisition of the barges?

At what point did the ministry seek to defuse the erroneous and misguided impression that the power barges would end dumsor? The fact is that if the media got it wrong, it was because they were misinformed by the government. More important, with our diverse media, both print and electronic, if the impression had not been created by the government, it would not have stuck.

The government has hidden under the ruse of the power barges and used the delay in the arrival of the barges to buy time. But now that the first barge is in and the government has realised that the truth that the crisis will not end with the barges, it has become imperative to have a scapegoat to explain the confused situation. The easiest path is to accuse the media of having peddled falsehood and forced the people to think in a certain manner for which the media, not the government, must be held accountable.

When the same erroneous message suited the purposes of the government, there was no need to point it out. Now we are faced with the reality of the limitations of the power barges. For as long as we do not provide the means of securing reliable and efficient supplies of gas and crude oil, we would continue to experience inadequate supply of electric power. More important, for as long as we do not provide the means to the Volta River Authority (VRA) to produce power in large measure but resort to independent power producers, such as that from the power barge, we would have to pay more, not necessarily that we produce inefficiently, but because we do not enable the VRA to produce at full capacity for economy of scale.

It does not make sense that through whatever means national resources would be applied to pre-finance private producers while what we collectively own is abandoned for lack of financial resources. It does not make sense to compel the VRA to pre-finance independent power producers when its own facilities lie idle for lack of capital to secure gas or crude for operations. It equally makes little sense that the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation finances the operations of the power barge when the funds could have been advanced.