Independent Broadcasting in Ghana Implications and Challenges cu n eu uy Kwame Karikari INDEPENDENT BROADCASTING IN GHANA INDEPENDENT BROADCASTING IN GHANA IMPLICATIONS AND CHALLENGES Edited by KWAME KARIKARI Acting Director, School of Communication Studies University of Gluina, Legon, Ghana Proceedings of the National Conference on the Promotion and Privatization of Radio and Television Broadcasting in Ghana Held at GIMP A, Greenhill, Achimota, March 1-3, 1993 GHANA UNIVERSITIES PRESS 1994 Published for the SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, LEGON by Ghana Universities Press P. O. Box 4219 Accra, Ghana © School of Communication Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, 1994 ISBN: 9964-3-0230-4 PRODUCED IN GHANA Typeset by School of Communication Studies, University of Ghana, Legon Printed by Domak Press Limited, Accra CONTENTS Page F o r e w o r d ...................................................................................... vii Acknowledgement .............................................................. xi Introduction: Kwame Karikari ........................................... 1 Privatization of Radio: Implications and Challenges - P.A.V. Ansah 15 Legal Framework for the Establishment of Independent Broadcasting Stations - D.K. Afreh ......................... 31 The Management of the Radio Spectrum as a National and Natural Resource - John R.K. Tandoh .............. 43 Technical and Engineering Questions in Establishing and Maintaining Small Broadcast Stations - T.N.L. Bonso-Bruce.................................... 57 Programming for Small Independent Radio and Television Stations - David Ghartey-Tagoe .............. 69 Independent Broadcasting Stations and the Rural Areas - A.K. Bonnah Koomson ......................... 83 Choosing Suitable Facilities for Independent Broadcast Stations - K.D. Frimpong ..................................... 97 The Advertising Market and Sustaining Independent Radio and Television Stations - C. Kofi Bucknor ... 107 Recommendations of the National Conference 117 v FOREWORD This book is a vivid testimony of Ghana’s recent efforts towards democratizing her media systems and organizations. It represents a major landmark in the road towards freedom of the press in the African context. The battle for access to free speech and flow of information in Ghana takes place within a worldwide context of popular resistance, struggles for national liberation and the control of power, knowledge and free expression. Things are not any easier or less difficult than elsewhere in this respect in this blessed land which witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s brilliant saga. But given the magnitude of the economic, social and political crises in Africa, it is appropriate to raise a fundamental question: why is progress with regard to freedom of the press in general and more particularly in the area of radio broadcasting so slow in taking root in this continent? It is important to examine this question from a historical stand­ point. Historians recognize that humankind’s primary communica­ tion revolutions took place in Africa. It is here that the first separation between the'sender and receiver of a message took place through cave paintings. The second major break in communication’s history was represented by the advent of writing through thousands of years of hieroglyphical systematic abstraction in ancient phara­ onic Egypt. The third communication revolution in world’s history was initiated by the Ashantis in particular and before them by the ancient Egyptians who were able to relay the first coded signals over considerable distances using “talking” drums and a sophisticated telegraphic language before Morse’s invention in the nineteenth century. When Gutenberg started his first experiences within a context dominated by Europe’s feudal and religious contradictions during the Middle Ages, Africa was still able to preserve and use her writing systems in the Congo, Mozambique, Ndebeleland, Angola, and other kingdoms as demonstrated by the Congolese historian Theophile Obenga. The loss of leadership in world communications is a recent phenomenon in Africa. It coincided with her decisive encounter with Western and Arab civilizations in the past four hundred years. It culminated in the advent of the submarine cable which was used during the Ashanti war to defeat militarily one of the most enlightened political leaderships in the African resistance move­ ment. The advent in 1935 of the first wired radio distribution system in Accra took place at a time when Africa was in a posture of total defeat. The late Professor Paul A.V. Ansah gave in his GBC Golden Jubilee Lectures a vivid description of the Empire Broadcasting Service in British-ruled tropical Africa. Ansah contended that “radio was to cater for the information, cultural and entertainment needs of the political and educated dlite who consisted of European settlers, colonial administrators and the small group of educated Africans.” In France’s empire in Africa, the Society de Radiodiffusion de la France d’Outremer carried out the same elitist and repressive approach to radio broadcasting as described by Francis Bebey in his excellent book Radio Broadcasting in Black Africa. In the Portu­ guese territories, the state of radio broadcasting was even worse given the backwardness of Portugal’s colonial apparatus as sug­ gested by Sidney Head’s book Broadcasting in Africa. Africa’s radio broadcasting systems of the post-colonial era are but a pale carbon copy of the former colonial systems’ radio broadcasting philosophies and practices. Fundamentally, the de­ scription given by Ansah of the first radio distribution systems in Africa is still valid with the exeption of a few externally-driven traps like the mass variable which is a strong indicator of Africa’s total domination by the mega corporations of the wired world. Many African journalists were killed over the past decades. A consider­ able number of media scholars and practitioners are still being jailed and tortured for their professional integrity and the correct fulfilment of their daily responsibilities. For most of them, the concept of a global village advocated for by Marshall Mac Luhan is a hoax. They know that internationally as well as nationally the media are still ruled to a great extent by a selfish, arrogant and sometimes unso­ phisticated greedy dlite of managers, false prophets and megaloma­ niacs. Time has come for change in Africa. The principles and ideals of popular democracy are taking place slowly but decisively throughout the continent. It is encouraging to see criers selling diversified products of the press in the streets of Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi, Bamako, Cotonou or Harare. There are also signs for hope in the advent offree commercial, independent and community-based radio broadcasting experiments throughout the continent. But Africa is still in the darkest ages of communication's history and world broadcasting. The African dlite must recognize that radio is not necessarily and only a tool for political and dictatorial propaganda. Radio is a tremendous means for scientific education, political enlightenment and socio cultural progress. It can even become a major channel for empowering the disenfranchised through the utilization of national languages and their promotion as official languages. If radio is to become the voice of the voiceless and a conveyor of popular will in the African context, it must fulfil two basic needs of the audiences. First, it must disseminate information and news relevant to the economic and social dignity of civil society under­ stood here as people’s organized elements completely marginalized by state power and its international allies. Secondly, the message conveyed must be the expression of popular control over the minority of professional politicians and not the means through which a silent majority is stifled. Participants to the national debate on radio liberalization in Ghana organized by the graduate School of Communication Stud­ ies, University of Ghana, Legon, discussed complex issues like the legal and technical implications for a fair access to the airwaves, the necessity to enact new legal instruments guaranteeing the protection of journalists but also of privacy and the pressing demand for the creation of a national body entrusted with the powers of decentral­ izing and democratizing the management of radio broadcasting services in the service of all. The recommendations of this national workshop represent a major step forward in Ghana’s efforts towards nation-building and national democracy. It is hoped that they will assist the national authorities and civil society to place radio broadcasting in Ghana in a worldwide movement for democratic development and popular empowerment. The paragraphs above represent my personal reading of com­ munications history and the role of radio broadcasdting in post­ colonial Africa. The credit for expressing myself as freely as I did here must go to the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) who generously contributed to the organization of the Conference on Privatization (democratization) of Broadcasting in Ghana in March, 1993. Through an innovative programme on the Democratization of Communications (DEMCO) launched by the Centre’s Regional Office in Western and Central Africa, IDRC in cooperation with other institutions has played a key role in providing assistance to governments (Mali, Senegal), associations of journalists (Niger, Senegal), research institutions (Ghana, Cameroun, Nigeria,