The Ghana Journalists Association says it received 100 laptop computers procured from a one million Ghana cedis Media Development Fund set up by the government.

Questions have been raised by media organisations about the whereabouts of the money which was pledged by government in 2011. 

The Minister of Information and Media Relations, Mahama Ayariga in answering a question on the issues on the floor of Parliament Wednesday said the government was still liaising with the various stakeholders to find the right modalities to disburse the fund.

The Minister, however, disclosed that the leadership of GJA met the government and requested for the laptops as one of their pressing needs.

“What we did was to invite the leadership of the various associations, who together identified as their major challenge, the need to facilitate the work of individual journalists. It was their recommendation that the basic tools they needed were laptops, which government was giving to students and other organisations but they never had these tools, and yet they needed those ones with internet modems so that when they go out to the field they could gather their stories, type it in there and file it in real time without having to run back to the offices to be able to report,” he said.  

Mr Affail Monney, President of the GJA, told Joy News the Association received 100 laptops from government and was promised more but none came.

The laptops were said to have been distributed to the 2012 Ghana Journalists Association Award winners.

This came to light after pressure mounted on government to disclose the whereabouts of the one million Ghana cedis Media Development Fund.

The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) which has been leading the campaign to locate the whereabouts of the Fund and how it is being expended has expressed surprise about what the GJA considered as a pressing need.

Executive Director of the Foundation, Sulemana Braimah, told Joy News the justification given by the journalists association for demanding the laptop was not satisfactory.

He said the GJA had given conflicting responses to the Foundation's queries regarding the status of the media fund. The GJA, did not disclose that some of its members received laptops bought from the fund.

According to him, the MFWA had contacted the Private Newspapers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG) and the Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association (GIBA) who denied receiving any disbursement from the Fund.

Sulemana Braimah said buying laptops for the award winners was not the best use to which the Media Development Fund could have been put.

Outside the capital Accra, even in the big cities such as Kumasi and Takoradi journalists in newsrooms are going through frustrations because they don’t have basic tools such as a recorder to work with, he remarked.

“There are basic logistical deficiencies. In fact you go to some newsrooms and they don’t even have a single recorder. You talk to journalists and most of them are just people recruited within the community who don’t have basic idea about journalism, and would require one week or two weeks introduction on fundamental of journalism,” he asserted. 

For him, the critical arears where the money should be spent are training and the procurement of essential tools for those who need them most.

On the management of the fund, he said the ECOWAS Protocol that mooted for the establishment of such a fund intimated that it should be managed by a statutory body.

In his view, the National Media Commission is an independent institution with the “capacity” and “integrity” to manage the fund.

This he believes would bring to a closure the confusion surrounding which organisation should be entrusted to handle the Fund.