I don’t know why Mr. Kofi Thompson thinks that he can hoodwink our youths into thinking and believing that the owners and operators of Radio Gold-FM had absolutely nothing to do with the poisonously dictatorial, Rawlings-led juntas of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) that effectively set back the otherwise salutary clock of Ghana’s development for and by ages (See “The NCA Must Never Be Allowed to Become an Instrument of Oppression for Ghana’s Repression-By-Stealth Brigade” Modernghana.com 10/28/17).
What is so stealthy or repressive about the owners and operators of Radio Gold-FM and Television being asked to pay up on their tax obligations for their usage of our publicly owned broadcast bandwidth which they have been evading for how long, any studious observer of the Ghanaian political scene can take a good guess, because the present main opposition National Democratic Congress has literally dominated the geopolitical landscape of the country’s Fourth Republic? Well, a comprehensive roll-call of the so-called “jackbooted military dictators,” and/or dictatorships, would scandalously indicate that it was the same owners and operators of Radio Gold-FM and Television who constituted both the cabinet and the allied staunch civilian backers of the institutional antecedents or precursors of the present-day National Democratic Congress (NDC), namely, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council and the Provisional National Defense Council.
In other words, if he really had the proverbial courage of his convictions, Mr. Thompson would rather be directing the insufferably unconscionable, criminally minded and plain thuggish operators of Radio Gold-FM and Television and their other media associates and collaborators to boldly confront the demons of their unenviable past. I mean, we are talking about criminal scofflaws here, and their executive and cabinet collaborators and scam-artist partners like Dr. Edward Omane-Boamah and Mr. Felix Ofosu-Kwakye, who deserve to be locked behind bars for a considerable length of time, for literally sleeping through the entire duration of their tenure, while getting fully and comfortably paid, with perks, and causing humongous financial loss to the State as Mahama Communications Minister and Deputy Minister, respectively.
It is also quite clear that Mr. Thompson’s understanding of the public ownership of broadcast bandwidth, and a broadcast manager or electronic media owner’s social responsibility for utilizing the same, cannot be higher than that of an elementary school pupil or, at best, a teenager’s. this is annoyingly ironic, because it was the very movers-and-shakers of the National Democratic Congress who enacted the very laws governing the media industry, which this gung-ho NDC propagandist is morbidly and vehemently decrying because, somehow, the general public ought to be made to understand that these media laws apply to all operators and owners of radio and television stations, except those who subscribe to membership of the National Democratic Congress.
Well, it is a wholly new day with a healthily democratically elected party in command whose leadership is not afraid to call the shots as it sees it, while evenly and objectively letting the chips fall where they may. And these pathological scofflaws and scam-artists had better not attempt to play fast-and-lose with the laws of the land or find themselves where they ought to have been all along.
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