The Executive Director of the Media Foundation for West Africa, Sulemana Braimah says the government is to be blamed for the country’s continuous drop in press freedom.
According to him, the government has failed to heed calls by stakeholders on the need to improve media freedom in the country.
“The problem is because we have a government that seems to be living in some self-denial, you present the fact and it is denied and one can make mention of a number of instances.
“So we kept warning, ringing the alarm bells that, look press freedom conditions are getting worse and this was way back in 2019 that we need to begin to do something about our press freedom conditions,” he said on Saturday.
Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile, he explained that the government had further worsened the conditions of the press by reducing its rights and freedoms to a debate.
“We were repeatedly told that is not the case, to a point where the president himself now decided to reduce the whole issue to a debate about whether or not journalists can criticise.
“He says we are crying over press freedom because ‘journalists do not want to be criticised when they are criticised, they term that an attack.’
“So it got to the point where you have party officials, political appointees referencing that statement and saying ‘journalists, they think they cannot be criticised, when you criticise them, they say you are attacking them,” he said.
