Invest in Information, Data Dissemination – Kufuor Advises African Leaders

Former President of Ghana John Agyekum Kufuor has urged African governments to invest in the dissemination of the right information to their citizens.

According to the former President, this will help prevent “the total collapse of Africa’s already fragile economies in the coming months and it will be a way of achieving the necessary behavioural change that is required by Africans”.

In an article published by Graphic Online, Agyekum Kufuor said during his administration, a lot of emphasis was placed on building the private sector with a strong and vibrant media.

“During my tenure as the President of the Republic of Ghana, there was an increasingly profitable private sector-driven media and communications sector,” he noted.

 “Liberalising media freedom and the opening up of the economy are among the proudest achievements of my eight-year Presidency from January 2001 to January 2009, while elsewhere across much of the continent, with the rise of promising economic growth and development and an emergent independent media and telecommunication ecosystem, many African nations also began to embrace a new era of transparent and accountable governance,” he added.

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Mr Kufuor expressed concern over the “regressive politics” which was gaining root in some countries.

“Late regressive politics has, however, taken hold of some countries, with ever more grim statistics of journalists being killed or attacked. The independent media have been taken over by governments or factional actors,” he submitted.

That development, he indicated, had drawn back Africa’s progress, with cascading effects on its people.