On March 27, 2018, one of Ghana’s budding and fearless journalists, Latif Idris, was brutally beaten to near death at the headquarters of the Ghana Police Service. The journalist, who works with the Multimedia group, was not beaten by thugs. He was beaten by police personnel, the same people he would have had to run to if he had been attacked by hoodlums.
His crime was for doing his job as a journalist by asking police officers a question at a time the officers had been deployed to maintain law and order by dispersing a supposedly rowdy crowd. Surprisingly, to the police, the approaches for maintaining law and order on that day included the resort to physical violence against a harmless journalist.
The vicious and shameful attack on Mr. Idris is not an isolated incident. It adds to a tall list of 11 other incidents of attacks involving a total of 16 other journalists in Ghana in the last 15 months alone. Sadly, security agencies and especially the police have been along the leading perpetrators of attacks against journalists.
Thus, the embarrassing attack on Mr. Idris, is a manifestation of deteriorating conditions of safety of journalists in a country that has had a positive press freedom record over the years.
Prompted by concerns of a deteriorating press freedom environment in the country, the MFWA issued a statement in 2014 with a tall list of incidents of attacks and violations against journalists in the country. At the time, the MFWA warned that the country’s press freedom ratings could drop if authorities and stakeholders failed to end the rampant attacks on journalists. A year later, Ghana’s press freedom ratings dropped from being “Free” to “Partly Free”.
Four years after the caution by the MFWA, the trend of wanton attacks on journalists continues and is perhaps getting worse. Journalists continue to be vulnerable to brutal attacks, which are perpetrated with gross impunity. For purposes of evidence, below are eleven other incidents of attacks on journalists from January 2017 to March 2018:
Sadly from all the incidents listed above and several others, no perpetrators have been punished. At best, the cases die with mere assurances of investigations by the police.
Why the Attacks are Continuing
A number of factors account for the persistence of the attacks against journalists in the country. Key among such factors are the following:
The MFWA calls on all stakeholders to help address the above challenges as a matter of urgency in order to improve the safety of journalists conditions in Ghana.
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