Naagyei 90.3 Fm Agyapa
This business of classifying Government Communication as a Government Flagship Programme and allocating hefty sums (GHS6million in 2020 and GHS4million in 2021) must stop,” the North Tongu Member of Parliament, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has said.
Ablakwa contends that this is only meant to fund government propaganda as a flagship programme given that the Ministry of Information has a separate budget.
The North Tongu lawmaker in a comment on Facebook said it’s unacceptable that the Goods and Services budget for the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) has been drastically cut from GHS7,016,420 in 2020 to GHS4,291,295 in the 2021 budget, however, the Akufo-Addo government squeezes out additional taxes from the people in these tough times only to fund government propaganda.
“One would have thought that during a pandemic where credible public education is a critical requirement to fight vaccine hesitancy and all the conspiracy theories out there, the NCCE budget would rather have been raised substantially and government communicators asked to take a rest. In any case, it is trite knowledge that in periods like these, the general public prefers to listen to non-partisan experts and not government propagandists,” he said.
