Read: otumfuo osei tutu’s full speech @ gja awards

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.