By Mohammed Awal
THE General Secretary of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), Dave Agbenu has warned members to stop denigrating on the annual awards to help the association sustain its sponsors.
According to him, Unilever and MTN among others have already pulled out, and that if care was not taken, the remaining sponsors may also pull out.
Dave Agbenu, who was speaking at the GJA Emergency General Meeting, held in Accra yesterday noted, “I can say without fear of contradiction that we will lose more sponsors if we do not discontinue the unwarranted attacks on the GJA awards…we will all be losers.”
Whilst admitting that organizing the annual awards winners’ event needed some fine tuning, he was, however, sad that “some members, most of whom are the beneficiaries of the awards, use the period to lambast and attack the executives and the awards committee members. I wish to assure members that having served on the executive for the past six years, the suspicions are unwarranted.”
Untouchables
He said there was a cabal of journalists, some of whom thought their status as award winners is sacrosanct and that no one deserved to be awarded, other than by them.
They, referring to the ‘cabal,’ he observed, “year after year question the integrity of the awards committee when they are not chosen and take to the internet and the social media, spew all manner of invectives, as well as pour scorn on the entire award, yet secretly collect the awards when no one is looking.
“It is a shame that this group of journalists expect the GJA to go for sponsors year after year to organize an award for them, forgetting that their utterances the previous year scared the great number of them away.”
Whilst other members of the GJA seemed to be backing the General Secretary’s reservations and found it “bizarre and unacceptable” when award winners’ run-down the integrity of the very award they win, by calling on the GJA to strip such people of the award, others believed that the best the GJA could do is to mop up the leakages in its system.
Meanwhile, the GJA asked that the annual awards be seen as part of the overall efforts by it, at “promoting high journalistic standards and as a barometer for measuring periodically the performance of the Ghanaian media and journalists in particular.”
African Eye News
