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KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY HIS MAJESTY OTUMFUO OSEI TUTU II, ASANTEHENE, AT THE ANNUAL AWARDS NIGHT OF THE GHANA JOURNALIST ASSOCIATION (GJA) AT THE BANQUET HALL, STATE HOUSE, ACCRA ON SATURDAY, 30TH AUGUST, 2014. It is a privilege to be your Guest Speaker for this year's Annual Awards ceremony. You will appreciate that it is not easy for us to accept to travel from Kumasi for such an event, but we have had no qualms whatsoever about making the journey for tonight because of the importance we attach to your Association and the respect we have for the media fraternity. You will also appreciate, I hope, the little difficulty a Guest Speaker for an occasion like tonight has. This is a celebratory event, a happy occasion when the cream of your profession gather to celebrate their achievements for the year, to let your hair down and forget the cares and tension of the past while you share and enjoy the plaudits of your peers. You necessarily require a convivial atmosphere, with good wine and good food to compensate, if only momentarily, for the grinding toil of the years gone by. The last thing you need on such an occasion is a killjoy who will dampen the atmosphere with any unpleasant thoughts. The trouble is that your invitation inferred that in addition to good food for the palate you craved for some food for thought from your Guest Speaker. And food for thought, as you perfectly know, does not always come coated in honey. So I hope you will understand if what we say also secretes some bitter taste in the mouth. I take comfort in the knowledge that I am in the midst of a hardy bunch of journalists who are steeled to grapple with reality. So let me waste no time first in congratulating this year's Award winners. The media landscape in Ghana continues to be vibrant and I guess competition for honours this year has been intense. To be adjudged worthy of honour by your own peers in such climate must be truly fulfilling. But you must not stop there. There is a global media network out there looking for talent to nurture and to grow. You have had the example of the late Komla Dumor, an award winning journalist of the GJA who went on to become a trail blazer with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) but whose life was tragically cut short during the year. Let the Komla example inspire you to continue searching for excellence in your craft. I address this not to the award winners alone, but to all of you, members of the Ghana Journalist Association (GJA) to continue to strive to improve and to aim for excellence. You may have missed out this year but there are oceans beyond for you to conquer. Yours is a unique profession and you do not need the service of a public relations consultant to sell yourself to us. Every day and practically every hour, you are in the public gaze. We read your output. We listen to you. We see you. If what is offered is good quality, we see and feel it and we applaud. We also see through the uninformed and untutored, and observe the arrogance and pomposity of those who see their media opportunity as conferring on them unbridled power to abuse and vilify. The pursuit of professionalism has its rewards but the shelf-life of the arrogant and untutored will be short. For, in this competitive environment, the public will be the judge and they will judge with their wallets. We will return to this theme later but let us take a step back, to consider the theme for this year's award night. The letter of your president Mr. Monney inviting us to be your Guest Speaker tonight conveyed some lofty sentiment. On the theme chosen for tonight's ceremony, he explained: "it has been chosen in furtherance of the GJA's efforts at contributing to building a strong and stable democracy in Ghana and to motivate the media to inspire national development through monitoring national projects and programmes and in holding public officers accountable." He added: "It is the Association's belief that the theme will inspire the nation to recommit itself to work to have the media as partners rather than adversaries in development." I hasten to add that the chosen theme for this ceremony is: "using development journalism to discern and defend the national interest." Mr. Chairman, I deduce from this that as an Association, you have formed the professional judgement that there is a need to define or redefine the national interest within the democratic framework and you have concluded that "development journalism" offers the short cut towards this "national interest" around which all of you, and all of us, can coalesce. At the risk of being over simplistic, the Ghana Journalist Association (GJA) want us and its members to place development at the heart of the national interest and to join together--media, politicians, civil societies--as partners in pursuit of the goal of development. I consider it of the utmost importance that you who are the torchbearers of freedom of expression should be spearheading the search for what I will see as a national consensus on issues of development. From the dawn of civilization, humanity has been moulded by the pen and the sword. The sword has conquered territories and nations but it is the pen, the ideas flowing from the pen that have shaped our thoughts and enabled us develop the systems of governance marking the difference between us and other mammals. We have grown to believe that the pen is mightier than the sword, although I have had to wonder why then any moment Jerry John Rawlings fires even a verbal missile, all the ink in our pens dry up. Unless of course we want to believe that there is something in our Jerry which makes him even mightier than the sword and the pen. Still, as the pen advanced civilization and helped shape great nations, the press came to be recognised as the fourth estate of the realm. To place it in today's context, it means that the press joins the rulers or executive, the legislators who make laws and the judiciary who interpret and enforce the laws, in a quadrangle for sound governance. In essence, the role of the press has been marked out as every inch as important as the makers and enforcers of the laws and every inch as critical as those who exercise executive authority over us. I am not sure that even you, hardy professionals that you are, fully comprehend the awesome power this gives the media. True, you may not desire any mandate from the votes of the people as executives and legislators, but that happens every four years as the case may be. In contrary, the press, are the permanent interface between the people and their rulers. Through you the people can speak and are spoken to by their rulers on a daily basis. The rulers themselves can do nothing without you because without you, they cannot reach out and connect to their people to maintain their confidence and support. Your job is to inform, educate and entertain and as you go up the ladder, you analyse, counsel and admonish. It is a truly awesome responsibility that can only be discharged through sound education, intellectual rigour, a high sense of responsibility and total commitment, tinged with a dose of modesty. You may not desire your mandate from the votes of the people as legislatures and executives do, but the foundation of your authority is no less profound. It desires and rests upon the solid rock of history, and the immediate moral foundation encapsulated in the sanctity of truth. The first thing you learn on entry into your profession is "facts are sacred. Comments are free." It tells you that the sanctity of truth is the foundation of true journalism. If you sacrifice the truth, you not only destroy reputations but I suggest to you that you crucify the media profession itself and endanger the society to which you belong. We will do well to remember this in the context of the pursuit of accountability in public life which is the lofty goal of every good journalist and which you seek to pursue under your agenda for development journalism. Accountability is not a pseudonym for vilification and wanton destruction of integrity. It is a desirable exercise to hold people to account for their actions, based upon facts, for their failings, based on facts, and for their judgements, based upon facts. Not every citizen is able to gather facts but the journalist, by his training, is supposed to be equipped to ferret out information, to know where and how to find it, distill it, verity it and present it in the form that we ordinary folk will understand. When you depart from the path of truth and replace conjecture for facts, when you conjure figures and allow others to manipulate information for the purpose of destroying others, you not only destroy the reputation of your victims, you turn your profession into a gamblers playground, undeserving of the place of honour it occupies in the realm. I need not bore you, because I am sure you are fully aware of the gravity of the consequences attendant to such misuse of the media. Nations have gone to war on the basis of wrong information. Governments have fallen because of wrong information. Powerful companies have collapsed on the basis of wrong information. Individual reputations have been ruined beyond redemption, and many moved to commit suicide on the basis of wrong information. Is there anyone here who will want to belong, or want his or her child to belong to a profession that can bring such consequences upon society? I am here tonight because I know that is not the kind of media you want to represent and I am persuaded that you are as concerned as anyone else about the lapses of a few elements that have had the potential to bring the whole media into disrepute and what you are doing represents another effort in the direction. To be fair, I think, in spite of some lamentable lapses, the press in Ghana has overall done a good job in helping to shape the history of our country. The press was a spearhead in the struggle for Ghana's independence and the press has been an active participant in the process of change from the first to the fourth Republican constitution. But while it has been a positive partner for change, the press has not established the same credit when it comes to sustaining the change and building an enduring foundation for the nation. It seems we have been so besotted with the notion of change that no sooner have we effected one than we began casting our eyes around for the next one. In effect, we have become change hunters rather than nation builders. I believe this is what has dawned on you now which has informed your choice of the theme for this year. You want our journalists to shift their focus and identify something they can grasp as the national interest and you think that can be found in development journalism. Mr. Chairman, there may be some cynical voices who may question your motives against the backdrop of the partisan divisions in our society. My response is, it is precisely because of the rancour, tension and confusion generated by the excessive partisanship of national issues that we now need to pause and define areas of national interest to which we shall all be committed as Ghanaians rather than as members of political parties. This should not be seen in any way as a step away from the national commitment to multi-party democracy. History tells us that notwithstanding the inherent conflict of ideas, democracy has never been a barrier to any nation's pursuit of its national interests. Indeed, the history of every great nation, most of all the nations whose democratic ideals we are trying to covert, has been a story of their unyielding endeavour to project, promote and defend their national interests. As our diplomats and students of international relations know too well, the cornerstone of British and indeed Western foreign policy is the notion that there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Those interests are the national interests derived from their common values and above all their vital economic interests. Who can deny that where those interests are at stake, there is no Conservative or Labour, no Republican or Democrat, no SDP or FDP. There is just the British, the American or the German interests and those interests prevail regardless of who occupies 10 Downing Street or the White House. By contrast, in Ghana, even the myth that the Black Stars unites us has been shattered by the shambles of Brazil and we are now more than ever consigned into our petty political pigeon holes of NDC and NPP with others moaning from the peripheries. I suggest to you that we are in danger of misapplying the multiparty system to the detriment of the nation. and your initiative provides an appropriate platform to begin the quest for change. We should forever bury the supremacy of the party and install and entrench in our minds that the nation is supreme and the national interest overrides everything else. So back to the old question, what constitutes the national interest for us? We may tum to the Derivative Principles of the Constitution for guidance. But from that broad canvas, let us focus on the ultimate issue of national interest. Mr. Chairman, I have alluded to what history tells us about the great nations of the world. It is pertinent for me to add that throughout human history, the only interest that has really mattered to them and to all nations alike is the economic interest of their people. Across the length and breadth of the planet, the quest for the development of individuals and of nations, is what has propelled mankind forward. It was the quest for development that drove the great discoverers and adventurers of ancient times to battle with treacherous uncharted seas. It was the driving force behind empire building. And it is the quest for development of China that has sent millions of Chinese citizens across the world, into the remotest villages of Africa, in the search for raw materials. President Bill Clinton captured it accurately in his famous campaign slogan: "it's the economy, stupid". So for a country like ours, the ultimate national interest can only be the development and growth of the economy, how we manage and grow the economy to provide for the things our people need, food on the table, a roof over our heads, to provide for the education of our children, health care for the sick, and above all, jobs for the people. You are therefore right on the need to focus on development. But we need to be careful here. Development is not about a list of infrastructural projects that can be easily monitored. Development is a product of the policies pursued by our governments. We cannot have sustainable development without sound sustainable economic policies. So we cannot presume to focus attention on development only by monitoring the implementation of projects without coming to grips with the broad policies driving or hindering development. It stands to reason that while project monitoring may serve a useful purpose, on its own, it could also be an unintended diversion from the crux of our problem. Therefore, you can do no better than brace yourselves not only for the impartial monitoring of projects but also for the objective analysis and evaluation of public policies affecting the economy. In seeking to define issues of national interest relative to national development, the national currency will have to be of high priority. We could not have forgotten so soon, the period in our history when a devaluation of the cedi was an instant signal for a military take-over of government. Thankfully, we have buried the past, and over the past decade or thereabouts, we have had the happy experience of a stable cedi underpinning the remarkable growth of our economy. Sadly, the wheels have turned once again, with the economy in decline and the cedi wobbling. Because the cedi is so crucial to the stability of the national economy, it is imperative, in my view that we remove it from the realm of partisan politics and place it as an issue of high national interest. This should require us, to strife to insulate the cedi from political and other pressures likely to undermine confidence and reinforce the institutional framework for defending and protecting it in the market place. We should have no inhibitions about following the practice of the major countries of the world in identifying foreign affairs and defense as areas of national interest requiring consensual policy formulation. But for me, there are two other areas that must be elevated to the national interest pedestrian. I speak of education and what I consider the most unpardonable shame not only to the nation, but to the African continent, namely the filthy environment and the consequential health hazards to which we are exposed. As you are all aware, from the day of our ascension to the Golden Stool, we proclaimed education as the centre-piece of our reign. We launched the Otumfuo Education Fund and through that and other interventions, we have educated over 7000 Ghanaians, from the primary to the tertiary level. We have supported deprived schools with infrastructure, and have initiated schemes offering incentives to teachers to motivate them to work in the most deprived areas. We have done this because of my passionate belief that education holds the key to the development of the nation. Yes, I am the King of a Warrior Kingdom, but as I declared on our last Akwasidae Kese, the only battle we want to fight is the Battle of Brain Power and the only battleground for that is education. So our commitment to education is total and we have been encouraged by the fact that every government during our 15 years has similarly highlighted education as its number one priority. Indeed, all our statistics show that education consumes the largest chunk of the national budget. And yet, results of our examinations such as the W.A.S.S.C.E. results just released leaves me wondering whether we are getting real value for the huge investment and effort in education. However one looks at it, a 50% failure rate is not and should not be acceptable to the nation. It tells me that we can no longer ignore the turmoil in the education landscape with teachers and government and employers daggers drawn almost as a matter of routine. Clearly, the turmoil is having an adverse effect. And clearly, the victims are our children. Beyond the strife and turmoil in labour relations, there is an even more fundamental crisis. In the short time that I have been Asantehene, the education system has changed three times, from three years of senior high school to four years of senior high school and back to three years of senior high school. In fact, if you calculate the delays in their initial enrolment because of the clash of pupils from the four-year period, and the time lost to them through teachers strife, the present crop of pupils only had two and a half years to cover curriculum which had been covered over four years previously. Our children are the victims today. But in the long run, it is the nation that will suffer. For if we fail to lay the right foundation for our children, we cannot hope to raise the skilled manpower, the men and women with the brain power to lift the national economy from the depths to which we are stuck. This is a matter of the gravest national interest and some crucial decisions ought to be taken to put an end to the reckless changes which only demoralise and confuse the educational establishment.