The Minister of Information, Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has encouraged journalists in the Upper West Region to write positive stories about the area in order to attract investment opportunities for the region.
The Minister stated that producing stories that projected the economic opportunities and other endowments of the region would augment governments of efforts at wooing the needed investment for the region.
“We can obviously do this through the stories we tell by not limiting ourselves to gory and negative news only, but also focusing on other key areas that can project the region. People are interested in investing in well-endowed areas; not just resources but good prospects as well,” he stated,
Mr Oppong-Nkrumah said this when he met with some media practitioners at Wa over the weekend as part of a day’s working visit to the region to interact with the practitioners on issues of national concern.
He defined balanced journalism as a practice that was geared towards promoting the good of an area by advancing its economic opportunities vis-à-vis reporting on usual occurrences and said both should be given equal attention in the media landscape as they both complimented government’s efforts at developing the nation.
The Minister reiterated that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had devastating effect on the economy of the country as well as other global economies and was therefore incumbent on Ghanaians to collectively work with government to offset the adverse effect of the pandemic in Ghana.
“The pandemic is real and has caused a strain on the Ghanaian economy; although we admit that it will take a while to recover, government will still need the collaboration of the citizenry to restore the nation’s fortunes and also deal with other things that bedevil us as a people,” he expressed.
The reason for which government, he stated had had to introduce additional taxes to raise more revenue to help deal with the depressed economy and continue to fight the pandemic.
He was therefore of the view that the journalists would be of more help to the restoration agenda if they were able to educate the populace to understand the intricacies of the pandemic as well as the difficulties it had brought on the Ghanaian economy and further encourage them to collaborate with government to work at reviving the economy by contributing a little more revenue.
“The cost of vaccinations among other interventions for instance warrant additional cost financing and therefore necessitated the introduction of the COVID-19 levy to enable the citizens donate a little to support government to deal with the pandemi,c” he said.
Addressing concerns from some of the journalists about the state of affairs in the country, the Minister reiterated that government had not authored any ‘culture of silence’ as was been speculated amongst the populace.
He added that the state of the economy would not have significant toll on the performance of government as well as the development of other sectors of the country such as roads and industrialisation as government had a clear policy direction to sustain the economy.
FROM LYDIA DARLINGTON FORDJOUR, WA
