NMC to Monitor the Coverage of District Level Elections

17th March 2014

The National Media Commission is set to monitor how the media cover Ghana’s up-coming District Level Elections (DLEs). The monitoring is to assess how much attention the media give to District Level elections. Experts say DLEs suffer from low voter turn-out and blame that in part on lack of media interest suggesting that the nation’s effort to develop local communities through decentralization will gain a major boost if the media showed interest in how DLEs are conducted and who gets to be elected.

At an Expert Meeting to discuss the approach to the monitoring, Professor Kwamena Ahwoi, professor of governance at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration and the Minister who pioneered Ghana’s decentralization pointed out the complexities involved in conducting DLE’s.  “The conduct of District Level Elections is much more complicated than presidential and parliamentary elections” he said. He explained that unlike presidential and parliamentary elections which involve only 275 Constituencies, there are altogether 60,125 electoral areas for the conduct of DLEs. In the case of Unit Committee Elections there are 5 Unit Committees in each electoral area hence there will be 300,625 Unit Committee Elections. Each electoral area is therefore treated as a unique electoral unit since candidates for elections vary from one electoral area to another. Separate ballot papers therefore have to be printed for each electoral area, other logistics must also be provide and distributed timeously to each of these areas to ensure successful elections. Meanwhile, unlike in presidential and parliamentary elections where the outcome of elections in one constituency may influence the outcome of elections in another constituency if not conducted simultaneously, the results of elections in one electoral area does not have any impact on other electoral areas in DLEs. According Professor Ahwoi, whereas campaign expenses in presidential and parliamentary elections are borne by the candidates and in some cases their political parties, the entire cost of running district level elections including mounting campaign platforms for candidates is borne by the state. He expressed his delight at the initiative of the NMC to monitor the DLEs and indicated that it will be useful to determine trends in the elections to inform policy formulation.

On his part, Mr. George Sarpong the Executive Secretary of the Commission said the media monitoring outfit of the Commission monitors ethical violations of the media.  He explained further that the media monitoring project will help assess the adequacy of information conveyed to citizens through news, direct political messages, public information programming and voter education announcements and disclosure of the presence or absence of hate language.

H.E. Kabral Blay Amihere, Chairman of the Commission expressed his gratitude to the participants for making time to participate in the workshop and encouraged them to support the Commission in executing the media monitoring project.

The Technical Advisor and Key Expert to the Commission, Mr. Koshen Aden emphasized the need for media monitoring especially during elections.

Mirella Marchesse, a media expert from the Italy based Osservaterio di Pavia Media Research also led a discussion on the media monitoring instrument and methodology. She explained that the project had three important components: "agenda setting" which deals with the main issues the media houses send out to the public; the "political coverage" which entails the total space and time allocated to a political actor and "hate speech" which covers offensive or inciting statements made by political actors.

There was a lively discussion session where participants including member of parliament, media practitioners, governance experts and chief executives of state owned media as well as civil society organizations and media monitors asked questions and made contributions on the media monitoring project.

In his closing remarks, the Chairman, Prof. Ahwoi advised the media to give more attention to the district level elections in order to keep the citizens both in the rural and urban areas informed.

The project is being supported by the European Union as part of its efforts to strengthen the technical capacity of the NMC to execute its constitutional mandate. It is part of the European Union support to Independent Governance Institutions (IGIs) is to scale up their capacity to address national electoral challenges, increase the integrity of electoral processes and foster accountable, open, transparent and participatory democratic governance in Ghana.