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By Isaac Ato MENSAH
Accra – 26 July, 2019
Our blog, writersghana.com, is one year old today – and we have been publishing thrice weekly since 26 July 2018.
To God be the glory.
“The only way to learn how to write is to write,” says my mentor.
So I started writing to elevate my writing skills and continuously improve.
To do this we decided to subject any article or story written for this blog to international peer review. Today’s blogpost is number 153.
The learning has been tremendous.
For our prospective clients what this means is that any work we undertake for them meets the highest global best practice standards of journalism, marketing communication, advertising, public relations and management.
Interestingly, Ghana’s National Accreditation Board says folks like us who choose to not pursue an MPhil or a PhD should leave the classrooms because we “do not have a research background”.
In our tertiary institutions today, such individuals do not even qualify as Associate Lecturer or Adjunct Lecturer.
Furthermore, by their directives a lecturer with a PhD in History whose first degree is in music will be asked to leave because his qualification is a “skirt and blouse”.
Scholarly research on Cross Referencing has no effect on them – nor have they ever heard that someone read Spanish Language or Music as their undergraduate degree then immediately went on to medical school, graduated and later successfully qualified as a neurosurgeon!
As my mentor will say in our part of the world, “If you say you will talk/write before you know it you would have become a bad person”. And that is a direct translation which every African person is familiar with.
To date, there have been only two attempts at challenging our blog posts.
First, the PRESEC Legon ’91 year group wrote a formal rejoinder challenging our use of the words “abandoned gym project”.
Their letter itself inferred an admission of the truth in our publication. We published that rejoinder verbatim.
The other one – not formally written – came from some social media sources that sought to challenge the sentence, “The Ghana Education Service (GES) cannot give accurate data about actual enrollment and cost at any given point in time, say the end of the first term/semester of the 2018-19 academic year”.
Suffice it to say that they were unable to supply the figures; their complaints were frivolous and lacked merit.
We were elated that yet another group of PRESEC old students, who also initially took offence at a story about the appalling sanitation situation in their alma mater, have made a U-turn and are vigorously addressing the situation – with old students resources that those who cost Free Secondary Education in Ghana have no idea about nor care to admit.
Progress is what we are after.
The demographics of our readers include ministers/senior public officials all the way to the Jubilee House.
But most often the “governing elite” choose to not comment or pretend to be annoyed, maybe to scare us. And of course the pitiful nation wrecking aphorism is never far off, “Either you are with us or against us”.
This we frequently hear from the paid hirelings of high officials.
But what do we care?
As we have had occasion to declare formally and informally, we are not interested in personalities and certainly not in name calling.
We have an unflinching resolve to adhere to principles and invite others to join us.
Of course, we may not always get it right but we are convinced that is the only way forward – facts, evidence and reason – anchored by an abiding faith in God, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Thank you all for your wonderful support; we owe you an eternal debt of gratitude.
Our vision? The VISION of Writers and Shakespeares Ghana Limited IS TO SEE individuals and organisations communicate with clarity and precision towards fashioning A BETTER WORLD, BASED ON EQUALITY AND MUTUAL RESPECT beginning with Ghana.
Feedback; [email protected]; www.writersghana.com; LinkedIn, Isaac Ato Mensah; Instagram, @atomenswriters; Twitter, @Atomens; Facebook, Isaac Ato Mensah; Telegram, Isaac Ato Mensah; Quora, Isaac Ato Mensah. WhatsApp (+233) 020 022 0353.
Writers and Shakespeares Ghana Limited exist to be a moral and intellectual guide to the best practice of PR and integrated communications around the world, beginning with Ghana.