The Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications Chief Executive Officer, Dr Ken Ashigbey, has called for stringent measures to be taken against Assin North Member Parliament (MP), Kennedy Agyapong, to deter others from towing the same line.
This comes after Mr Agyapong’s call on his TV station, NET 2 TV, to the general public to “mercilessly beat” Luv FM’s Erastus Asare Donkor for his live reportage of the Ejura shootings, which resulted in the deaths of two residents.
According to Dr Ashigbey, Mr Agyapong’s utterances were reckless and harmful to not just Erastus Donkor, but to all journalists in the country.
He, thus, called for Mr Agyapong to face the full rigours of the law, and that other external bodies aligned with the media be called upon to add pressure on the organs of government dealing with the MP’s case in order to ensure that the right thing is done.
“I’m pretty sure that when we start putting all of those pressures on the various bodies then they will act. We just have to change the way we have done our things in the past,” he said.
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He said another alternative to dealing with the issue is to take the matter before the West African Court.
“One of the areas that I’ll urge all of us to consider is going to the West African Court. There is precedence that when Yahaya Jammeh with all his things on journalists, a particular journalist was helped by the West African Media Foundation to take the case to the West African Court be it that it’s a civil case, but that case was won there and the Gambia was found guilty, there was a fine and definitely that comes with a stain on itself,” he said.
He was, however, hopeful that the Privileges Committee will take into consideration that the MP is a repeat offender and will thus recommend stringent measures be taken against him.
“I’m also cautiously optimistic that based on the fact that this is a repeat offender the various committees, the various organs when they get to look at it, they will definitely not have the luxury of saying this is a first time person, this is somebody who has issued threats and I’m not saying that he carried the threats for Ahmed Suale, but it was subsequent to his threat,” he said.