GJA goes to the polls on July 9 (Page three) March 14, 2009

Story: Michael Donkor
THE Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) has fixed July 9, 2009 for the election of a new President and other executives for the association.
This has become necessary because the tenure of office of the current president of the association has come to an end.
Consequently, it has appointed an Election Committee, which will organise the election, and an Election Dispute Adjudication Committee, which will sit on appeals against the decisions of the Election Committee and adjudicate on post-election disputes, should there be any.
The committee is chaired by a member of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) Board, Mr Benedict Assorrow, while the members are Mrs Betty Apau-Oppong of GTV News and Mr Mawusi Afele of the Ghana News Agency (GNA).
The Election Dispute Adjudication Committee is made up of Mrs Jeanette Quarcoopome as Chairperson, Alhaji Razak El-Alawa, a veteran journalist and media consultant, and Mr M. Addoquaye, the Greater Accra Director of Elections of the Electoral Commission.
The President of the GJA, Mr Ransford Tetteh, announced this at an emergency general meeting of the association at the Ghana International Press Centre (GIPC) yesterday.
He said the meeting was organised in fulfilment of the constitutional requirement to hold an annual general meeting and elections in the first quarter of the year, which could not be done because of the national general election.
The framers of the GJA constitution, when they shifted the tenure of office of the executive from two to three years and ruled for elections to be held in the first quarter, obviously did not envisage that it would from time to time clash with national elections, he added.
He said last year was a tedious year for the media, saying that had even started a year earlier with the coverage of the primaries of the political parties, through the electioneering, the elections and the run-off.
Mr Tetteh said they were hampered by the fact that the GJA Secretariat and the GIPC had to play roles in the successful coverage of election programmes to promote peaceful and credible elections.
He said that was why the emergency meeting was called to enable the members, as the highest decision making body, to chose a date for the election.
The GJA President expressed the hope that there would be a smooth transition after the election and a hand over of power, which was being planned to coincide with the 14th GJA Awards ceremony scheduled for Saturday, August 15, 2009.
He said the event would climax the 60th anniversary celebrations of the association.
He said the GJA was encouraged by the declaration of President John Evans Atta Mills in his State of the Nation Address to Parliament that his government was very committed to transparency and accountability and his commitment to work towards the enactment of the Freedom of Information Law.
He expressed the hope that President Mills, who, by his presidency, automatically becomes the GJA’S Chief Patron of Press Freedom, would help to ensure that the law was formulated to enhance the free flow of information and satisfy best practices in democracies as they pertained elsewhere in the world.
The General-Secretary of the GJA, Mr Bright Blewu, said the association, in collaboration with the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), would, in April 2009, launch the “Ghana Media Standard Improvement Project”.
The two-year project, which will be jointly managed by the MFWA and the GJA, is being funded by DANIDA.
He said the GJA, in collaboration with the National Media Commission and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), would organise a roundtable forum to evaluate the performance of the media in the coverage of the 2008 general election.