Executive Director of Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), Sulemana Braimah, has waded into the attacks of journalist at the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) headquarters in recent times and believes the party headquarters is gradually becoming a danger zone for journalists’.
The Comment comes after Ohemaa Sakyiwaa, a reporter with Multimedia, was assaulted by a known matriarch of the NPP, Hajia Fati.
The reporter was slapped when she tried to snap a photo of Hajia Fati after she disallowed Sammy Crabbe, a suspended Second Vice Chairman of the NPP, from picking up forms to contest for the party’s chairmanship race at the party’s headquarters.
Mr. Braimah also carped the party’s leadership, saying their failure to crack the whip on culprits had led to a deluge in these acts of impunity.
The Executive Director of MFWA, Sulemana Braimah, believes the headquarters of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) at Asylum Down in Accra, is gradually becoming an unsafe ground for journalists, given the number of attacks recorded there.
Speaking on an Accra based radio station, Mr. Braimah said the NPP had neither acknowledged nor responded to the petition forwarded to the party’s office.
“The NPP headquarters is increasingly becoming an unsafe ground for journalists and that is because it appears that the current leadership of the party seem to condone attacks on journalists at the party headquarters, and I say so because last year [2017], there was an attack on some journalists.”
“When that incident happened, we wrote condemning the incident and demanded that at least the party’s leadership should come out and condemn the incident so a strong signal will be sent to activists of the party that the leadership will not condone such acts against anybody and particularly against journalists. We did not hear anything from the party. We petitioned the leadership of the party, but our petition did not even get any acknowledgement.”
He said the party had similarly failed to punish culprits in this recent incident as no arrests had been made yet. Mr. Braimah also advised journalists’ “If there should be an event that a journalist should cover, they have to go with the mindset that they are going to an unsafe ground.”
By: Joseph Nii Ankrah.
