Daily Graphic’s Silence On Police/Military Brutalities At Ejura Annoys Ghanaians

The Military and Police gun violence against demonstrators at Ejura in the Ashanti Region has dominated the headlines on every media platform, except the national broadsheet, Daily Graphic, which chose to publish promotional commissioning of a Toyota assembly plant in Ghana.

And the loud silence on the killing of two demonstrators and the possible maiming of four more by the Police and the Military which live bullets into the crowd of demonstrators has annoyed Ghanaians, particularly on social media.

Angry Ghanaians are demanding the head of the Editor of Daily Graphic, Kobby Asmah, for the absence of the Ejura violence on the front page of Graphic.

One of the unhappy Ghanaians lamenting Graphic’s snob of the Ejura violence is Justice Baidoo, a senior journalist with the Multimedia Group whose flagship outlet is Joy FM.

“Very soon, the people will treat journalists as part of the system that is choking this country. I have been saying for so long that conveyor-belting has created a situation where journalism is Ghana is not reflecting the reality we live with,” Baidoo said.

“The Daily Graphic, once upon a time called The People’s Daily Graphic, Ghana’s largest newspaper, which runs heavily on being a public service newspaper did not feature the brutalities in Ejura in any of its front-page stories today,” he lamented in a Facebook post.

Mr. Baidoo adds that omissions like the kind are the ones that create festering grounds for untrained journalists who deliver news in insults to arrest the attention of the news-consuming public.

Other commentators on social media have posted pictures of Kobby Asmah and named him the man who “ensured that the Ejura mayhem wasn’t highlighted in Daily Graphic.”

Mr. Asmah is believed to have kept the story away from Graphic’s front page for political reasons because of his alleged political link to the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).

 The shootings by the Police were against people who were demonstrating over the killing of a leading member of the #FixTheCountry Movement, Ibrahim Mohammed.

The Movement had been in court with the State after the Police had refused them permit to demonstrate against the government.

Meanwhile, other unhappy Ghanaians have been berating the government on social media for the brutalities at Ejura. One of them, head of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) Dr. Steve Manteaw.

“I join all right-thinking Ghanaians in condemning the atrocities meted out to our compatriots in Ejura, whose only crime is to demonstrate in a free democratic society. The time of reckoning shall soon catch up with this gov’t (government)” he wrote.