By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
It is obviously easier for citizens like Dr. Wilhelmina Donkor to fault the media for promoting discord and rhetorical vitriol, than to painstakingly and critically examine the underlying causes of such abusive use of language and promptly seek the requisite remedy (See "Media Will Start 'War' in Ghana If... - Historian Predicts" Ultimate Radio / Ghanaweb.com 3/7/14). We must also quickly point out that contrary to what some of our opinion leaders would have the rest of us believe, Ghana's independence was declared on a patently discordant note, with four of our legendary Big Six founding fathers being completely ignored in the declaration, and nearly every significant achievement notched on the road to independence being exclusively self-credited by that one man who did the declaring on that historically blighted night.
And yes, "The independence of Ghana is meaningless, unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent." Rather ominously ironic in retrospect; and even as Tanzania's President Julius K. Nyerere was to poignantly and sneeringly observe, it was rather viscerally quixotic for the man who had shown himself to be grossly incapable of uniting the citizenry of his own country, to so cavalierly presume himself to be capable of uniting the relatively far more diverse people of the African continent overnight.
At any rate, what makes the decidedly one-sided concern of critics like the KNUST history and political science lecturer suspect is that it seeks to pontifically prescribe the ideal of what constitutes best media praxis, without also logically taking into account the fact that the media can only offer for consumption the veritable produce of the listeners/audiences themselves. In other words, the media does not exist in a vacuum. Indeed, if more than half of its programming consists of abusive language, then, needless to say, the fault may be aptly seen to squarely lie with the caliber of our national leadership. And the latter, of course, includes Dr. Donkor who is also described as Acting President of the Garden City University College.
If there ever should occur any civil strife in Ghana, it would almost definitely come from the quality of language put into the public domain by our leaders, and not ordinary citizens who merely and invariably take their behavioral and rhetorical cues from their leaders. Such was clearly the case in Rwanda and all the other sometime troubled spots across the African continent. And this is what we ought to be discussing throughout the nation, if, indeed, language abuse is a major problem among the majority of our citizenry.
We just recently witnessed the grossly irresponsible tolerance of abusive language under the tenure of the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills. And, in fact, so fetid and rancid was the situation that even a prominent feminist activist-lawyer and recently elected parliamentarian was forced to publicly wonder whether the criterion for appointing and retaining cabinet operatives was the inimitable capacity of these appointees to linguistically abuse their ideological opponents with reckless abandon. And, rather regrettable to say, presently, under the putatively checkered tenure of President John Dramani Mahama, Dr. Atta-Mills' former arch-lieutenant, the situation has not gotten any better. To be certain, it well appears to have gotten worse.
Dr. Donkor, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology historian, not being a media expert by professional praxis, may not know this, but the media enterprise operates squarely on a profit-and-loss ledger/margin. What this means is that to stay in business, the proprietors of these media establishments have to give their target audiences what the latter desire. If opinion leaders like Dr. Donkor do not take kindly to much that passes for media programming, the best approach to inducing a linguistic climate of respectability, or mutual respect and trust, is to team up with policymakers, especially those in the local government sector, to vigorously promote a healthy linguistic protocol. This would also, perforce, involve the Ministry of Education, the institutional seat of our collective national temperament and identity.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
March 8, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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