MEDIA BRIEFING ON DISCRIMINATION

Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo

The Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC) has organized a seminar to brief and sensitize media practitioners on Ghana’s 3rd, 4th and 5th Periodic Reports to the United Nations Committee on the eradication of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and recommended actions.

The seminar which was held at the Coconut Groove Hotel in Accra forms part of Ghana’s obligation to coordinate and ensure implementation of recommended actions by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and other stake holders.

In an opening address delivered by Mr. V. T. Kuzuume, the Chief Director of the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs on behalf of the Deputy Minister, he said, Ghana has come very far as a country in addressing issues relating to women and children’s survival, protection and development and is still moving forward. A number of giant strides have been taken by Ghana in fulfillment of its national, regional and international communities, he said.

At the international level in particular, Mr Kuuzume said, Ghana demonstrated its commitment and political will by not only signing, ratifying various conventions, treaties, protocols, and resolutions but also through promulgation of laws and implementation of various strategies with the view to creating a society in which women enjoy full equality with men and the full realization of their rights as guaranteed under the Constitution and the laws of Ghana.

Mr.Kuzuune urged media practitioners to assist MOWAC and other stakeholders by actively participating by giving innovative and implementable strategies on how to communicate effectively to move the gender agenda forward to address issues of subtle discrimination against women and girls in the Ghanaian society.

Mrs. Doris Mawuse Aglobitse, The National Professional Officer, Advocacy and Resource Mobilization, representing the United Nations (UN) System said, Ghana ratified the United Nations Conventions on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against women without reservation in July 1986 and consequently submitted its initial and second Periodic reports in 1991, as required. In 2005, she said, Ghana further submitted its 3rd, 4th and 5th Periodic reports to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women and defended these reports in August 2007.

Mrs. Aglobitse said the role of the UN in Ghana has been in the area of providing technical assistance as well as some funding to the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs and other NGOs in implementing programmes that are of benefit to women and girls. Currently, she said, the UN System has a joint programme with MOWAC on the implementation of the Domestic Violence law which was passed last year. Aspects of the programme dowel on awareness creation, capacity building for law enforcers and rehabilitation of abused victims.


Mrs. Aglobitse said, the UN System in Ghana will continue to provide support in these areas based on what the government presents as its area of priority.

Mrs. Marian .A. Tackie, Director of MOWAC in presenting the overview of the United Nations conventions on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and status of implementation said, CEDAW was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979 to reinforce the provisions of existing international instruments designed to combat the continuing discrimination against women. She said, CEDAW identifies many specific areas where there has been discrimination against women such as political rights, marriage and family employment. Mrs. Tackie continued that CEDAW spells out specific goals and measures that are to be taken to facilitate the creation of a global society in which women enjoy full equality with men and the full realization of their guaranteed human rights.

On Implementation of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Mrs. Tackie said, Ghana ratified the CEDAW without reservation in July 1886. Ghana follows a dualistic approach towards the incorporation of treaties into domestic law. This means that international conventions need to be incorporated into domestic laws by legislation to give them full legal effect. She said, other provisions of CEDAW were complied with through review or amendment of existing legislations or promulgation of new legislations. Examples are the Domestic Violence Act and the Human Trafficking Acts which are in incompliance with UN Declaration on Elimination of all Forms of Violence against Women. Ghana has complied with its reporting obligation under the convention and submitted five periodic reports to the UN Committee on CEDAW. She said Ghana’s 6th and 7th reports are due in 2011.

Mrs. Tackie said, further action taken since the submission of its 3rd, 4th and 5th reports include, press reporting on Ghana’s presentation of it’s CEDAW reports to CEDAW Committee, printing of 3rd, 4th and 5th periodic reports and the other related document for dissemination to all stakeholders among many others. Mrs. Tackie further stated that certain measures have been taken in line with CEDAW periodic reports to increase women’s participation in politics and decision-making. She stated some of them as sensitization of and capacity building programmes for women to run for office are organized periodically. Also, a high level of consultative dialogue was organized as part of Ghana’s 50th anniversary under theme: “Enhancing participation of women in decision-making positions”. She added that political parties have also been urged to incorporate gender issues in their political agenda and to ensure that women participate in leadership on equal basis with men.

Ghana, Mrs. Tackie said, has taken concrete measures to translate various conventions, treaties and protocols Declarations and Resolutions relating to Gender Equality and Women and Children’s Rights to development into implementation policies, programmes. She said, a major constraint however, is the lack of adequate financial resources to translate all its commitment into desired measurable results. Mrs. Tackie said, with the injection of more financial inflows especially from the UN System funding agencies, Ghana would be able to achieve its development goals targets relating to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

ISHMAEL TAKES OVER

Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo

Ishmael Tweneboah-Kodua, a student of the University of Education, Kumasi Campus has been sworn-in as the 43^rd President of the National Union of Ghana Students. (NUGS)

The swearing-in took place during the NUGS handing-over ceremony which was held at the Sonat Court Hotel in East Legon here in Accra. The impressive ceremony was well attended by a lot of students across the length and breath of the country who were all eager to witness the solemn occasion.

Ishmael won the Presidency in a fiercely contested elections held at the University of Development Studies, Nyankpala Campus during the 42^nd annual delegates congress a month ago. He took over from Mr. Kweku Tuoho-Bombason. The other national officers sworn-in include Billy Jones Owusu, the General Secretary, Gabriel Adomako-the Financial Controller and Patrick Ayittah- the Coordinating Secretary. Also sworn-in are Daniel Thompson for the position of the Programs and Projects Secretary, Bahiratu Kamal as the Women’s Commissioner and Delali Pearce-Kporha sworn-in as the International Relations Officer. The rest are Banning Ahmed and Malik Abass Daabu sworn-in as Education and Democratization Secretary and Press & Information Secretary respectively. Simon Amanor, Kwaku Mensah John and Abdul Karim were also sworn-in by the new NUGS President to represent NUGS on the National Youth Council, GETFund and the All African Students Union respectively.

Mr. Kweku Tuoho-Bombason the out-gone NUGS President in his farewell speech paid a glowing tribute to the late Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Hon. Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu saying, the late Minister had been very supportive to his administration and NUGS in general.

Mr. Bombason said, the past NUGS year has been eventful, one carrying with it both memorable and regrettable ones. He said, “regrettable as some of those moments may be, they provided us with great learning opportunities that guided us in our resolve to ensure that the interests of our constituents were adequately protected”.

Mr. Bombason enumerated some of the successes chalked by his administration. He said, primary among them was the redefining of NUGS, which meant having a united student front capable of bargaining and lobbying strongly for its needs, a student front which will allow its internal structures to work, and one that will resolve its disputes without having to resort to media war thereby ridiculing its own leaders. He said it was through the hard work of his administration that NUGS now have a seven year strategic development plan that will serve as a blue print for the Union’s development, a new Constitution, and financial procedures manual to regulate the management of the Union’s finance.

Mr. Bombason said, it was under his leadership that NUGS got the international recognition that it deserved. He said, this was evident in the Union’s invitation and participation in a United Nations programme in the United States, a youth leadership programme at the Liverpool University in the United Kingdom, and Global University Network for Innovation –Africa programme in Nigeria. He also touched on the successful organization of the 42^nd National Delegates Congress which was recently held at the University for Development Studies on the theme; “Ensuring Peaceful, Free and Fair Election 2008; the Role of the Student”. He said all these and many more successes could not have been possible if not for teamwork and discipline on the part of national officers against the background that "I and my colleagues inherited a suspicious, image battered union", he said.

The out-gone NUGS President seized the opportunity to advise the in-coming national officers to make teamwork their habit, and to be wholly committed to the struggle for the students of Ghana. He reminded them of the need to leave above partisan politics as that some few years ago was the waterloo of the union but rather place the interest of the students of Ghana as their core business.

Mr. Bombason advised politicians to be more tolerant of each other and dissenting opinions, for he said, these are fundamental elements of a true democracy. He reiterated NUGS call on all well-meaning Ghanaians to put their hands on deck to ensure a successful election come December 7.

Ishmael Tweneboah-Kodua in his acceptance speech said, he and his colleagues are aware of the task ahead of them. He said moving the union forward in historic strides on her progressive path as the champion of students’ unity and freedom shall be a non-negotiable agenda. “Fellow students, he said, to respond is positive but to react is negative and so NUGS under my tutelage will not be a reactionary organization and will not take adhoc decisions.

Mr. Tweneboah-Kodua said, “the unprecedented overwhelming endorsement I received from students across Ghana at Nyankpala during our congress speaks volumes of the level of confidence my colleagues have in me. I cannot betray that trust and confidence reposed in me as well as my colleagues”.

He called on all other stakeholders to partner his administration because every support extended to us will be applied only to the benefit of the Ghanaian student in particular and Ghanaians in general. He said.

The Chairman for the occasion, Professor Nana Steve Sobotie advised the new executives to live above reproach and let their lives reflect their new responsibilities. He said they should first and foremost remember that they are students, and must therefore combine effectively their new roles as student leaders and their academic work. He said there is the need for them to change a lot of things about them especially the way they talk and relate to people.

Military must take over if……

Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo

Dr. Vladimir Antwi-Danso, a Research Fellow at the Legon Centre for International Affairs (LECIA) has advocated for a military takeover in Ghana if there is any violence after the December 7 general elections.

He said a military takeover will be necessary to avert any calamity that may befall the nation after the December polls since all the political parties, especially the NPP and the NDC are claiming victory way ahead of the polls. He said if the political parties refuse to accept the results of the elections; the military must intervene for at least two years to restore law and order after which fresh elections will be organized.

Dr. Antwi-Danso was speaking in an exclusive interview with the Accra Daily Mail (ADM) on power sharing in Africa and a possible power sharing arrangement in Ghana, as the country holds crucial elections in three months time.

On the likelihood of electoral crisis erupting in Ghana before, during or after the December polls that could lead to power sharing Dr. Antwi-Danso said, it is possible but not probable for an electoral dispute to arise after the December polls considering the entrenched positions the political parties have taken especially the ruling NPP which is looking for a historic third term and the NDC which has also promised to reject any result that will give victory to the NPP.

He was quite unequivocal. He told ADM that should there be an electoral crisis in Ghana after the December polls which threatens peace and stability, the military must takeover to save lives and property but said it is not a probability for electoral dispute to erupt after the polls because of Ghanaians’ compassion for one another and willingness to let go in the name of peace.

On the issue of why there are so many electoral disputes in Africa, Dr.Antwi-Danso said the Westminster/presidential type of governance where the winner takes all or first-past-the-post is not favourable and proving to be difficult in Africa because of the economic and ethno-political mosaic of the African people. Neo-patrimony, in which an office of power is used for personal use and gain, as opposed to a strict division of the private and public spheres or corruption are contributory factors to electoral crisis in Africa.

The politics of vengeance, said Dr. Antwi-Danso, and vindictiveness are other factors contributing to electoral violence in Africa. He cited Ghana as an example where the NDC will want to win power by all means so as to be able to imprison NPP functionaries because the former claims the latter has imprisoned its members, the latest being Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata.

He said a critical factor is that politics in Africa has become a conduct not for service but for luxury and fame and therefore everybody wants to get there through fair or foul means. Africa therefore must re-look at the type of democracy that it needs to suit Africa’s own specificities. “This is the only sure way Africa and for that matter Africans can enjoy economic and political stability and prosperity” he said.

He advised politicians to always seek the interest of the nation and the people they seek to lead first, instead of putting their own parochial interests ahead of everything.

Power sharing in Ghana?

Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo

The peace and tranquility that our country has enjoyed over the past years will indeed stand the test of time come December 7 when Ghana goes to the polls.

The world will be waiting to see if Ghana will continue to be the pacesetters and take its democracy a step further or will crumble like many African countries which include Kenya and currently Zimbabwe.

It is indeed significant to note that Ghana had gone through four general elections successfully and peacefully. Indeed one will not be wrong to say that Ghana is a peaceful nation in the troubled Sub-Saharan Africa. If Ghana is peaceful, then the question that readily comes to mind is what is peace?

Peace can be a state of harmony or the absence of hostility. "Peace" can also be a non-violent way of life. "Peace" is used to describe the end of a violent conflict. Peace can mean a state of quiet or tranquility — an absence of disturbance or agitation. Peace can also describe a relationship between any people characterized by respect, justice, and goodwill. Peace can describe calmness, serenity, and silence. This latter understanding of peace can also pertain to an individual's sense of himself or herself, as to be "at peace" with one's own mind. Peace can be also the living of the family calmly together without any quarrels.

If this is what peace is all about then, we can say that Ghana is in the safe zone. It is also refreshing to see and hear all the political parties contesting in this year’s general elections in December 7 preaching peace and the need to tolerate diverging and dissenting views since democracy is all about agreeing to disagree

Proponents of the democratic peace theory argue that strong empirical evidence exists that democracies never or rarely make war against each other. However, recent developments especially on the political arena, give us something to be concerned of.

Just last week, the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) Presidential Running mate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumiah was in Tamale in the Northern Region to campaign for his party and there was a clash between the supporters of the NPP and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) which left at least seven people dead and several others injured and displaced not forgetting the massive damage to properties worth thousands of Ghana cedis. Not long ago, the Presidential Candidate of the opposition NDC was reported to have said that, he and his party will not accept anything than victory in the forthcoming general elections, since there is every indication that the ruling NPP have failed and Ghanaians will reject them come December 7. He was reported to have said that, if the NDC does not win, “There will be Kenya in Ghana”. Indeed, we are all witnesses to the bitter experiences the Kenyans went through after their disputed Presidential elections in December 27, 2007. The violence that erupted after that disputed elections claimed thousands of precious and innocent lives and caused extensive damage to properties.

Reports from the camp of the ruling NPP also suggests they are not ready to relinquish power, since they claim their government under President Kuffour has done marvelously well economically, politically and socially and therefore looking forward for a historic third term to continue with their good policies. The NPP also claims that they have discovered oil in commercial quantities and must therefore stay in power to manage the oil revenue effectively and efficiently.

Equally disturbing is the rigging scare ex-President Rawlings continues to spread around thereby calling on the supporters of the NDC to reject any result of the election that will declare the NPP as the victors.

This development in our political arena indeed leaves much to be desired. It is these same politicians who go about preaching peace yet again the same politicians are preconditioning the minds of their teaming supporters to reject the results of the polls when it does not go in their favour. What a contradiction!

It is interesting to note that, the two major political parties in Ghana, thus the NPP and the NDC are accusing each other of planning to rig the forthcoming December 7 elections so as to win power. It is equally interesting that both the NPP and NDC are claiming victory ahead of the December polls. This situation indeed threatens the rather young democracy we seek to guide jealously.

Considering the entrenched position taken by the two major players in our political game ahead of the December polls, one begins to wonder if the two major parties are beginning to sing the chorus of power sharing which seems to be the new trend in the African politics.

The questions that readily come to mind are among others, is Ghana prepared for a parliamentary system of government, where we have a President who is the head of state and a Prime Minister who is the head of government? Do we have the resources as a nation to support this type of government? Will the NPP agree to share power with the NDC when they win power and vice-versa? Who then become the President and the Prime Minister? Since Ghana has a peculiar problem where none of the Presidential Hopefuls is a sitting President. Where will the executive powers reside? With the President or the Prime Minster? How many people will have to die before the power sharing agreement is brokered? This is because thousands of people died both in Keyan and Zimbabwe before the power sharing agreement was reached. In the event of power sharing, who will become the Commander-In-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces? The President or the Prime Minster? Who will be the boss?

With all these questions unanswered, our politicians especially the Presidential candidates of the two major political parties should spare us the agony of Keyan and currently Zimbabwe.

As Ghana decides come December 7 , all we can say is God save Ghana.

Student leader decries indiscriminate posting of posters

Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo

The President of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) of the African University College of Communications (AUCC), Mr. Henry Marbell, has expressed concern about politicians pasting their campaign posters around the country indiscriminately.

He said they are behaving as though there are no rules and regulations covering the pasting of posters, especially in Accra, the national capital. He said the practice “has made the streets an eye sore and does not give a good impression about us to people visiting Ghana for the first time.”

Mr. Marbell said it is disheartening to see politicians, who are seeking the mandate of the people to lead and therefore should know better offending against bylaws. Politicians, he said, violate the bylaws of the district assemblies with impunity, “and yet expect the citizens to be law abiding”.

He called on Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies to ensure that bylaws are enforced and advised politicians and event organizers to employ other forms of modern communication to drum home their messages.

Mr. Marbell said leadership is by example and so politicians seeking the people’s mandate “should not take us for granted but rather abide by simple rules and regulations”.

NUGS elects new President

Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo

The National Union of Ghana Student (NUGS) has elected Ishmael Tweneboah-Kodua a student of the University of Education-Kumasi Campus as the president of the union for the 2008-2009 NUGS year.

At elections held during the 42^nd annual residential delegates’ congress of the NUGS at the University for Development Studies-Nyankpala Campus, Tweneboah-Kodua polled an overwhelming 252 votes representing 53.96% to clinch the presidency, thus becoming the 43^rd NUGS President.

The congress was themed: “Ensuring Peaceful, Free and Fair Elections 2008: The Role of the Student”.

Kofi Boateng, a former treasurer of NUGS in the 2006-2007 academic year and currently a student of the Ghana Institute of Journalism, managed a disappointing 156 votes representing 33.4% of total votes of 467, placing second to Tweneboah-Kodua.

Edward Awunnore, Hakeem. H. Hamisu and Malik Cheno, the other contenders of the presidency only secured 37, 14 and 6 votes respectively. Two votes were however rejected.

Meanwhile, Billy Jones Owusu from the University for Development Studies-Nyankpala Campus has been elected General Secretary of NUGS. Owusu secured 317 votes out of a total of 467 representing 67.88% to beat his contender Maxwell. Z. Agbambilla a student of the University of Ghana-Legon, City Campus who managed 145 votes representing 31.05%.

With the Financial Controller portfolio, Gabriel Adomako beat his two other contenders with 214 votes as against 151 and 99 votes for Ernest Asare and Zimblim Saaka respectively. Two votes were rejected from total votes of 466.

Patrick Ayittah, a former student of Jayee Institute and the out-going President of the Ghana Union of Professional Students (GUPS) was elected the Coordinating Secretary with 215 votes from total votes of 466. His contenders, Daniel Dotse Yao from the University of Ghana-Legon and Samuel Afriyie from GIJ secured 140 and 106 votes respectively.

Daniel Thompson of the University of Ghana, Legon, secured the mandate of the Programs and Projects Secretary with 268 votes.

Ophelia Akosua Brantuo of the University of Education, Kumasi Campus, could not stand the heat from her contender, as she succumbed to Bahiratu Kamal by losing with 167 votes as against Bashiratu’s 296 votes from a total of 467 votes cast.

Delali Pearce-Kporha outpaced his contenders with 247 votes to clinch the position of the International Relations Officer of NUGS.

The Education and Democratization Secretary and the Press & Information Secretary which were contested unopposed went to Banning Ahmed and Malik Abass Daabu respectively.

Simon Amanor, Kwaku Mensah John and Abdul Karim all secured the mandate to represent NUGS on the National Youth Council, GETFund and the All African Students Union respectively.

Meanwhile, James Hamilton who lost the position of treasurer by a single vote has filed a petition challenging the results as to why total votes cast summed up to 470 instead of 467.

Zenith College holds matriculation

“Be the change you want to see”

Zenith College holds matriculation

Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo

The President of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) of Zenith College, Mr. Faisal Ibrahim has advised the youth of the country to use dialogue and non-violence in addressing their grievances for that, he said, is the only way of reaching a consensus and finding amicable solutions to disagreements.

He was speaking at the Sixth Matriculation and “Akwaaba” Week Celebration of Zenith College in Accra on the theme of “Be the change you want to see”.

The SRC President said gone are the days when students used radical and violent means in addressing their grievances which let to mayhem and in the extreme cases loss of precious lives and damage to properties.

He urged the youth to reject any politician who will preach violence in the forthcoming December elections. This he said “is the only way we can be the change that we want to see”.

Mr. Lawrence Nyarko, the Dean of Students said, the theme for the occasion could not have been more appropriate. He said “If the freshmen and women want to be the change that they want to see, they should be serious with their academic work, and go beyond classroom work to acquire more knowledge in order to cause the change that they want to see”.

Mr. Davis Nii Armah, a guest speaker at the celebration, advised the youth to change their attitude and believe in themselves. “If nobody believes in you, you will surely succeed but if you do not believe in yourself, then you are bound to fail, so believe in your capabilities and abilities” he said.

Kwabena Osei Kuffour a musician known popularly as ‘Obour’ said life did not begin at forty of said but life begins now. He said anybody who believes life begins at forty is a failure. “The youth hold the key to our national development”

He encouraged the students to take active part in school activites especially student politics so as to be politically mature to take up higher political responsibilities after school.

He advised the students to be law abiding especially as Ghana decides in December and do away with any politician who does not preach peace. “Be the change that Ghana needs not the change that greedy politicians need” he said.

Traffic lights or Decoration Poles

Away from the politics of running mates to the politics of…

Traffic

Lights

As a measure of our underdevelopment. Why don’t they work? Who is in charge?

Who pays for the accidents caused by faulty ones? No answers from AMA, the Police, Urban Roads and signalling companies…

An Accra Daily Mail (ADM) Special Survey by Yirenkyi Opare-Akuffo and Mary Samini

In this election year, any presidential candidate who can assure the Ghanaian electorate that they can make traffic lights work, would most definitely win many votes from the thousands of motorists and pedestrians who have become victims of the country’s non-performing traffic lights. Traffic lights in the national capital and other cities are often at best mere unsightly decorations and at worst instruments of confusion, destruction and death.

A simple invention, but one of the most inspired in human history, traffic lights are everywhere. They are to cities, towns and villages, what valves are to the human heart. Without them, there would be no controlled pulse to modern human habitation and life itself would be threatened. With only three colours, green, amber and red, traffic lights direct movements of cars, trains, human beings and just about anything that moves in human settlements with motorized means of transport. They were invented in the last century by an African American at a time when modern cities were beginning to experience “jams” between cars, humans, horse-drawn carriages and trains. Traffic lights, without doubt, can be described as the heart of the modern human settlement. In a sense, traffic lights are a measure of a society’s civilized behavior.
They are signaling devices positioned at a road intersections, junctions, level crossings, pedestrian crossings or any location that requires orderly and ordered movement. They are found all over the world and in Ghana there are about 138 signalized systems in the capital, Accra. This number, many transport and traffic experts, say is totally inadequate for a city the size of Accra.

Though the Ghanaian figures are unimpressive, many problems continue to be associated with the few traffic lights in Ghanaian cities which compound human and vehicular traffic in the country. Traffic light locations have become sites of terrible smash-ups leading to serious injury and destruction of automobiles. In a survey conducted by ADM, it was clear that traffic lights in the national capital just don’t work and some have been out of commission for months on end without being repaired or replaced.

When ADM took up the issue with Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Daniel Julius Avorga, Commanding Officer of the Motor Transport and Traffic Unit (MTTU) of the Ghana Police Service, he said the police are not responsible for the installation and management of the traffic lights in the country.

He told ADM that “FACOL and Signals and Controllers Limited are responsible for the maintenance of the traffic light” in the city.

ACP Avorga said the police have been reporting the cases of faulty traffic lights to the two companies but “keep on receiving the same complaints of power fluctuations, hit and run drivers, obsolete spare parts and thieves stealing parts of the lights making replacements very difficult.”

Asked why the police are not present at the locations where traffic lights do not work, he attributed this to lack of manpower in the police service. This has led to the often dangerous and embarrassing presence of bedraggled unemployed youths “volunteering” and taking over those locations to direct traffic whilst at the same time badgering motorists for money.

On that, he told ADM that such “volunteers” are being arrested and some of them have been prosecuted and made fined GH¢ 60 (600,000 old cedis). Hardly a solution to the problem.

The ACP also disclosed that some of the volunteer wardens were drug addicts. “When twelve of them were put under observation”, he said “they were found to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms.” He advised all road users to be cautious on the roads especially where traffic lights are not working and pleaded with the public and other stakeholders in traffic management to appreciate the efforts of the police and cooperate with them to make the roads safe for all.

The press, he said, should also be circumspect and stop reporting only on the negative aspects of police work.

When then the PRO of the AMA was contacted he lamented saying, “I am sorry we are not responsible for the traffic lights, but go to urban roads and they would help you”. Mr. Theodore Quaye, the Accra Metro Roads Traffic Engineer of the Department of Urban Roads told ADM that most of the traffic lights in the capital are not working because they have outlived their useful life spans of 10 to 15 years.

Because of this problem, he said, their parts are out of production. “Even where you are lucky enough to get some of the spare parts of these obsolete traffic lights, they are very expensive as compared to replacing the traffic lights entirely,” he said.

The Electricity Company of Ghana’s (ECG) frequent and constant power fluctuations, he explained, also lead to the failure of the traffic lights.

The traffic lights, he said, can take 230 volts but sometimes go under voltage and over voltage resulting in the burnout of the circuits of the lights.

“Hit and run drivers” he also claimed “are also a major source of the problem.”

Mr. Quaye, however said, traffic lights in Accra are being changed from the incandescent bulbs to light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs which are cost effective and energy saving.

He said so far about 25 of the traffic lights have been replaced with LED and very soon the whole of Accra will be covered.

He revealed that there is a project soon to be started by the Department of Urban Roads where all the traffic lights will be changed under an area-wide signal control for Accra.

The fund for the project, he said, has been secured by the government, and it is expected to be completed by 2012.

“Under this project, all the 138 signalized systems in Accra will be computerized, monitored and controlled from one control room…This means the issue of non-functional traffic lights will soon be a thing of the past,” he said.

Mr. Leonard Casely –Hayford, the Managing Director of Signals and Controllers Limited, one of the two companies contracted to manage and maintain the traffic lights in Accra also confirmed the problems enumerated by the Accra Metro Roads Traffic Engineer, but said technology is leaving Ghana behind “and we should try to catch up with the rest of the world.”

Traffic lights in Ghana should be state-of-the-art technology as in other parts of the world.

“Non-functional traffic lights will soon be history,” he said.

But the question still remains: Who is in charge of Accra’s traffic lights? Who takes responsibility for locations where traffic lights don’t work? Who pays for the accidents that arise due to faulty traffic lights?

Another question, which touches very deeply into the Ghanaian psyche is why don’t Ghanaians respect traffic lights? Ghanaian drivers drive to beat traffic lights not to obey them. Amber to the Ghanaian motorist means “speed up” instead of “prepare to stop”. As the society grapples with the problems of non-performing traffic lights, the indiscipline of the traffic light cheating driver also imposes its own problems. The simple traffic light could after all be the best yardstick of our level of underdevelopment…

WELCOME MARBELL, WE LOVE YOU

Yesterday, 8th July, 2008 was the day AUCC students went gay. The Reason? Marbell was elected S.R.C President that special day. We drunk and danced the whole night with our jubilation knowing no bounds.
May God bless this fine Tuesday when all AUCC went gay. We say Marbell we love akwaaba awaawaatuu.
We say may you find favour with the Lord. May your reign be filled with success. We promise you today of our unflinching support for your Presidency. We say Congratulations. Ayikoo. Mo ne oko pa a woa ko awie. Berima Katakyie ye ma wo amo ne adwuma den. Wo se na wo fata enti ko so ara na di wo hene.
Welcome and we love you

MARBELL IS THE PRESIDENT

Marbell Henry was yesterday, 8th July, 2008 elected the S.R.C President of AUCC for the 2008/2009 academic year in an election held in the school.
Marbell who is also known as IGWE emerged as the winner of the Presidential election polling 139 votes from a total of 251 valid votes cast representing 55.4% with his contender, Asinyo Edem Kobina Antonio managing only 112 votes representing 44.6%
Ironically both men have been the best of friends for some years now.

The result came as no surprise as Marbell was widely expected to win and it is worthy of note that Antonio gave Marbell a run for his money. The election which was keenly contested, with both candidates virtually sitting on thorns, started at about 8:30am with low voter turnouts in the early hours of the day but later picked up.
By the results of the elections, Marbell becomes the sixth S.R.C President of AUCC with the elections going down into history books as one of the most fiercely contested between two fine gentlemen who are the best of friends.

Meanwhile, Fiifi Ninson Botchway was elected Vice President with 141 votes representing 56.2% against Bertha Eyram’s 102 votes representing 40.6% with 8 rejected votes representing 3.2%. Frederick Takyi also succumbed to his contender managing a disappointing 99 votes of total valid votes cast representing 39.4%. His contender, Bernard Attiah Donkor popularly known as Bananey secured 145 votes representing 57.8% to clinch the Organizer position with 7 rejected votes representing 2.8%

With the General Secretary/Public Relations Officer portfolio, Linda Mireku beat her other three contenders massively, as she secured 167 votes representing 66.5% with her closest contender Wendy Marfo, a late entrant managing 31 votes representing 12.4%. Eunice Raquel Antwi-Adjei and Jonnel Dotse were a disappointment securing 26 and 20 votes representing 10.4% and 7.9% respectively. 7 votes representing 2.8% were rejected. On the other hand, Ruby Azalatey was not able to stand the heat as she gave way to her contender by losing the Welfare Officer portfolio with 109 votes representing 43.4% to Ella Nongo who scored 55.8% translating into 140 votes. 2 ballots were rejected representing 0.8%

The other positions were however contested unopposed. The Women’s Commissioner went to Nana Ama Banful, who polled 204 votes and the Local GUPS/NUGS President going to David Kweku Babayara, securing 220 representing 81.2% and 87.6% respectively. Frederick Duodu however secured 224 votes representing 89.2% to clinch the Financial Secretary.

The election was free, fair and transparent and I commend the electoral Commission for a job well done. At the close of polls 251students out of a total number of 329 on the voters register cast their votes representing a voter turnout of 76.3% which is highly commendable.

LEADERSHIP CREDENTIALS

I was class prefect in primary five and six and a compound over-seer at Oda Wesley Primary School from 1995-1996

I became the assistant class prefect in JSS One, then rose the class prefect position in JSS Two and Three respectively and a sectional leader/house prefect in my final year, at Oda Wesley JSS from 1997-1999.

I became an assistant class prefect for two academic terms at Koforidua Sec/Tech School in the 2000-2001 academic year.

I then became a class prefect from secondary school form one to first term form three at Akim Swedru secondary School. I rose to the position of Head Prefect, became a member of my school’s SRC and subsequently got elected as a Regional Trustee of the Eastern Regional Students’ Representative Council (ERSRC). I was the President of my school’s branch of the National Union of Presbyterian Students of Ghana at Akim Swedru Secondary School in the 2002-2003 academic year.

Currently, I am the Class Rep. of the first year students noon session of the African University College of Communications (AUCC). I am also the Domestic Projects Coordinator of the Journalists for Human Rights Chapter of AUCC.

I am also the Regional Coordinator for Programmes & Administration of the ERSRC and the General Secretary of the Conference of Heads of all Regional SRCs. I am also the ERSRC’S Representative on the Federation of Youth Associations of Ghana (FEDYAG) Eastern Regional Branch.

AUTHOBIOGRAPHY OF YIRENKYI

THE BOY IN HIS YESTERDAYS

Yirenkyi Opare – Akuffo was born on the 11th day of March, 1984 to Akuapem parents, Nana Kwaku Opare - Akuffo and Juliet Akua Obiribea Asante as father and mother respectively, from Akropong – Akuapem and Mamfe-Akuapem respectively in the eastern region of Ghana.

I had a very humble beginning starting from the Local Authority (L.A) nursery school at Suhum also in the eastern region where I stayed in that department for only six months and was transferred to Wamfie in the Brong Ahafo Region to join my father and my step-mother. As a child I was particularly interested in sports especially football but due to ill-health I had to forego my ambition of becoming a great football star.
When I got to class one, my father traveled to Nigeria and my step-mother sought transfer to her home town, a village called Anamase in the eastern region. My step-mother was taken ill short after our arrival in the village and my father also met a lot of misfortunes in Nigeria. Life became so difficult for me and my siblings and the future was so bleak for us. All this while I was just seven years old. But I never lost hope as I had faith in God. And it was the timely intervention of my grand mother that saw my self and my siblings back in school again.

My father returned from Nigeria three years later and we moved from Anamase to Akim Oda. In a new community, and a town for that matter I could not find my bearings until some months. At the Birim LA primary school I became the main topic for discussion as a boy from the village, I settled so fast and begun to dictate the academic terms of my class thus class four. Unfortunately, the school was just to see only one year of me as I was transferred to another school, Oda Wesley Primary school.

In my new school my academic prowess began to show as I was nominated class prefect of my class thus class five three weeks after reporting. My interest in extra curricular activities saw me joining the drama troop. That same year my school joined other Methodist schools in the district and in fact Ghana to celebrate John Wesley Day. My school was asked to perform a play depicting the calling of John Wesley-the founder of Methodism. I was given the responsibility of acting the role of John Wesley. With my quest to make an impact everywhere I find my self, I acted it so well that I was quickly called John Wesley even by The Reverend Ministers right after the programme.

In primary six, I was nominated by my teachers for the post of compound over-seer a position I handled to the admiration of all my teachers. I also became the overall second best student that same academic year thus the 1995-1996 academic year. I graduated to Oda Wesley Junior Secondary School (JSS) now Junior High School (JHS). There we were asked to write an entrance examination, and yet again I came out as the third best student out of 150 applicants. After two weeks in JSS/JHS 1 I was elected the assistant class prefect. In JSS/JHS 2, I was unanimously elected the class prefect due to my hard work and the desire of always making an impact and serving as role model to my colleagues. It was therefore no surprise when I was elected house prefect/sectional leader in my final year while I was still the class prefect. Yet again my academic prowess showed when I was the joint best student of my school after the release of the results of the 1999 Basic Education Certificate Examinations.

I gained admission to Koforidua Secondary/Technical School in 2000 to purse General Arts. As fate will have it, the long and icy hands of misfortune caught up with me once again as my father lost his job. This made it impossible for me to pay my school fees and as a result spent only two academic terms in the school. I then went to stay at home with the idea that I have become a school drop out and my dreams and aspirations shattered. It air worth noting that even with my short stay at Koforidua Secondary/Technical School, I was the assistant class prefect and a member of the school’s drama troop. I was also part of the contingent that represented my school and won the 43rd Independence Day March Past Award in the Eastern Region.

Lady luck however smiled on me the following academic year as my grand father secured a scholarship for me. This enabled me to get back to school again, however to repeat the class and in a different school-Akim Swedru Secondary School (AKISSS) in 2001. I immediately announced my presence in the school as soon as I was admitted by contesting in the then weekly debate organized by the Junior Graphic and won the first prize. That made me the toast of both teachers and students and was immediately elected the class prefect. Few weeks later, I led a team of first years as a Principal Speaker in a debate contest against the second years and won handsomely. I was then given the huge responsibility of leading my school’s debate team into challenging the best debating school in the Birim South Distict now Birim Central Municipality, Oda Secondary School. My resolve to always be among the best if not the best, and the desire to always make an impact motivated me into the battle. This time around, the status-quo changed and we emerged the victors. It is also worth mentioning the record I set in the in the school and still hold. I came out tops for two unprecedented academic years only dropping to the third position in my final year.

In my third year, I had to resign as the class prefect because I was elected the head prefect or school prefect and by default became an executive member of the students’ representative council. I was also elected the President of the National Union of Presbyterian Students’ of Ghana (NUPS-G) branch in my school. The student activism in me wouldn’t let me rest until I contested and won emphatically as the first Zone Five Trustee of the Eastern Regional Students’ representative Council (ERSRC) with eleven secondary schools under my jurisdiction all in the 2002-2003 academic year. I also led my school’s team into a constitutional week celebration quiz organized by the District Directorate of the National Commission on Civic Education of the Birim South Disrict Assembly now the Birim Central Municipality for all the seven secondary schools now senior high schools which my school came out tops.

I taught as a pupil teacher after secondary school at Mawuli International School at Akim Oda from September 2003 to May 2004. There again my leadership instincts showed as I was nominated to act as the secretary of Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). I was nominated as the staff secretary and as the head of the examinations committee.

My bid to excel in communication motivated me to enroll at NIIT in 2004 to study computer networking since I believe communication and Information Technology go hand-in-hand. I graduated in 2006 with an Honors Diploma in Network Engineering.
For me, I have always maintained that position is not an end but indeed a means to an end.


THE BOY IN HIS TODAYS

My desire to cause a positive change in the lives of students in Ghana and the eastern Region in particular sent me back to the region in August 2007 to contest the post of Regional Coordinator in charge of Programmes & Administration which I won convincingly. Barely two and a half months later I was unanimously elected the General Secretary of the Conference of Heads of all Regional SRCs. By dint of the fact that I am the Regional Coordinator of ERSRC, I represent the ERSRC on the Federation of Youth Associations of Ghana (FEDYAG). I was a member of the team that represented all Regional SRCs at the 41st National Congress of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) in August last year at the University of Education, Winneba. This I did in my position as Regional Coordinator-Programmes & Administration.

As a student of the African University College of Communications (AUCC) where I have enrolled to pursue a two-year diploma in communications, I have equally paid my dues as a student in activism. In just two weeks of admission, I was unanimously nominated as the class representative a position I am still holding. Just a little over one month after my admission, I was identified by the Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) a club in the school and subsequently nominated to the position of Domestic Projects Coordinator. A position I have held till now and have discharged my duties effectively and efficiently. I was also identified to be a member of the committee that drafted the constitution of JHR. This I did with the support of people like Henry Marbell as the chairman, Dela Odoo a member, Susuana Ago as the secretary and Fiifi Botchway also a member. The work was done within three weeks. People both internally and externally including Mr. Kofi Attoh, an Accra based Lawyer and a Lecturer of AUCC has described the constitution as one of the best he has seen.

I have fairly represented AUCC on several students’ platforms including the Ghana Union of Professional Students (GUPS) re-union night at NAFTI in Accra, the GUPS central committee meeting at the Trans Africa College also in Accra and the Emergency NUGS congress at the University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast in the Central Region of Ghana. Also worthy of note is that I was part of the first year debate team that beat the second years’ in a debate competition during the “Akwaaba Week” celebration to formally welcome the freshers into the university fraternity. I was also a member of AUCC’S debate team that trashed JAYEE Institute during the SRC’S Women’s Week celebration of the former.

I have participated in some club activities. These clubs include the Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) and the Institute of Public Relations (IPR) AUCC Chapter though I am yet to join the later.

I was a member of the students’ delegation which attended the funeral of the late Phidelia Alornyeku a student of AUCC who died after a short illness.








MY TOMORROW

I stand at the bank of the river and shout “floret” “floret” for the today I see shall be seen no more. What I welcome is my tomorrow and with a beam of smile, I embrace it with all the goodness it brings. I also say when you dream, dream big. For the dream may come true.
Yirenkyi Opare - Akuffo

Yirenkyi believes the future is today’s contribution and that what one does in future is only the completion of what one has started yesterday. This conviction has necessitated why I believe I am going to continue with my student’s service. I wish to cease the opportunity to state here that I am neither an opportunist nor seeking my selfish desire, but partisan I only desire to cause a positive change wherever I find my self and to make a strong impact as well as be a source of inspiration and motivation to others...

My greatest desire is to become a communication expert in human rights reporting, an international lawyer, and work with any international organization that is into human rights issues. I wish also to be a great and vibrant politician to continue causing positive change in people’s lives.

Personal Ideologies: Personally I believe that the African is his own enemy as a result of the number of coup de tars which only retard development and progress. But I also do believe Africa’s problems have been blown out of proportion and that we, are just like other people, on the earth surface. Every country and continent has challenges. Those challenges of the African continent could be solved by the very Africans and that the Brotonwood societies are only helping us to compound our challenges whiles they whitewash their own. I am a socialist and do believe there should be an equal access to national assets and worth.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT, FOR THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL.

U beautiful girl you must be vigilant. Always take care of yourself. For men have only deceptive tongues. Their sayings are not consistent with their characters. Their tongues are as sweet as honey and you are like a big drum every one wants to beat. Boys will pretend they love you but deep, deep in their hearts they don’t love you. They only want to have their way with you. Wait upon the lord for the right time. For sure, God has a project for your life. And remember the motor of men and boys; thus love is the name and sex is the game so forget the name and play the game. Be wise my beautiful girl.


When life makes you to put up with mean and hateful people, just think of them as sand paper. They may scratch you and rub you the wrong way, but you end up smooth and polished; and the sun paper would be worn out and ugly. Beautiful girl, love your enemies it will drive them crazy.

YOU BEAUTIFUL GIRL

1. U beautiful girl, indeed you are beautiful. There was a great vacuum created in my life, which I thought no man or woman conceived of a woman can fill it. But I was wrong after all. All of a sudden I felt the vacuum being filled I though I was day dreaming but it was real. You were there to fill the vacuum for me. You beautiful girl indeed you are God sent.
2. U beautiful girl indeed you are beautiful. My whole world came to a stand still, when I was deserted by the person that I have ever loved with all my heart, my soul, body and everything within me. My whole life became meaningless and life was nothing to me any longer. But then you brought light and hope back into my life. You gave me a reason to live as a normal man again. You beautiful girl, you brought meaning into my life; you are the source of my joy and happiness. Indeed you beautiful girl, you are the life line to my dead line.
3. U beautiful girl indeed you are beautiful. I was deserted and rejected by everybody around me especially those I loved most. The whole world rejected me, and everything in this world also rejected me. I was lonely and had no body to talk to, no body to give me warm embrace, and nobody to love and care for me. I had nobody to defend and protect me. Indeed the whole world had crumbled on me. But then you came to love and care for me. You came to defend and protect me. You came to embrace with a warm smile and said to me, I love you. You told me you will never leave me and that I will never be lonely again. You said you will always love me. U beautiful girl indeed you are my dream come true and my savior. U are indeed beautiful.
4. U beautiful girl indeed you are beautiful. I set out on a journey to the four corners of this world my mission? Simple, I was looking for love. I was not looking for just love but I was looking for a true real and unconditional love. A love that is natural and the person who will love me for what I am but not for whom I am. I have been searching for this love for several years and could not find it. I went to the length and breadth of this world but all to no avail. So I came to the conclusion that this love I was looking for does not exist. But just one day, I found this love and this is the beautiful girl. Yes! You lifted the lamp of love and shown the way that leads to true love. Beautiful girl, you are my long searched true and real love. You are indeed my true love and with you my life is complete. If I do not see my true love for a second my heart weeps, but if I see her for just a second my sings joyous praises. Beautiful girl, indeed you are beautiful and the source of my inspiration. You are the dream and ideal lady every man wishes to have. You are beautiful my beautiful girl.
5. U beautiful girl indeed you are beautiful. You are not only beautiful outwards or physically beautiful but your inner beauty is what beats my imagination and understanding. Your inner beauty can not be compared to any thing. God really made you! Your beauty sometimes makes me think if you are not a supernatural being. The reason is that I have never in my entire life met someone beautiful like you before and your beauty is second to none in this world; it has to be said. I must confess that if beauty, charm and elegance were to be passports to heaven, you will enter without a visa. Ah! You are really beautiful my beautiful girl.
6. U beautiful girl indeed you are beautiful. My beautiful girl, please don’t listen to your friends. Not every friend is good remembering. Some of your friends are jealous about us. They are jealous because you are beautiful both inside out than them. They are also jealous because of the love we have for each other. They can see we love ourselves so much and that what we feel for each other is true and real love and because of that they are jealous. Beautiful girl, please do not listen to the advice of your friends. They want us separated so we would end up like them. Make an investigation into their saying lest you risk throwing a precious stone away. Have always positive thought about our relationship. Please know that temptation is always around. Let us be strong and enjoy our happiness for the rest of our lives. You beautiful girl, my beauty and priceless gift, you are indeed a perfect companion. You are beautiful, beautiful girl.
7. U beautiful girl indeed you are beautiful. People always talk about first impression or love at first sight nut I as a person never believed in that. I never believed that I could see someone just once and be completely being head over hills in love with the person. But hey! I was wrong because I was utterly flabbergasted when I saw your angelic face the first time. In fact I was completely lost and it then dawned on me that first sight love was indeed real. Beautiful girl, I must admit that you are the first lady to attract my attention at first sight and I must say that there is something about you that no other lady has. In fact, my whole life revolves around you and your influence is so great. You are really my heart beat. I am indeed enjoying you my beautiful girl. Beautiful girl my heart now belongs to you so please take very good care of it. Any time I look at you whiles you speak, it sends some waves through my veins which non woman has been able to do. When I am looking at your face, I can see a sun of love shining in your face and attracts me like a magnet. Darling, you are my joy and happiness maker I can’t help it but to say you are beautiful and very special and I say I love you with all the passion in me. You are beautiful my beautiful girl.

A Framework for Crisis Management and Crisis Management Planning

Crisis does come as a surprise and as unexpected time but any organization, commercial or public sector can prepare itself for the inevitable and everyone should.
make every effort to gather the pertinent facts quickly access the situation and respond to key audiences, non open and honest manner
enact the necessary measures to swiftly resolve the situation without jeopardizing the industry and safety of your company, your co-workers and your customers
Appoint executives to a standing crisis, communication team who will be call on in times of crises to make decisions and determine policies. Members should include the CEO, COO, CFO, PR Manager, Marketing Manager and customer service manager ant the very list, appoint one member of the team typically the PR manager as the primary contact between the team and the public also appoint a deputy crises administrator to serve as the backup of the primary administration
educate employees specially top and middle managers about your crises procedures
Establish communication strategist to address crises to situations. Select the appropriate spokes person, create press materials. Communicate your crises response to all key and audience employees, government agencies, vendors, consumers and the media.
Continually monitor the media for sign of escalation if signs are appellant adjustment may be required. Remain objectives and be wiling to make the necessary adjustment. Remember that changing your strategy is okay if your original plan isn’t working as well as you thought it would.
at all times take pains not to create the perception that your organisation doesn’t care or lacks integrity
Be as objective as possible when evaluating data, analysing consumer and media reactions and making judgement about the effectiveness of the crises of your crises communication programme. Is the media coverage positive or negative? What key message points are being made in media stories about crises? If they don’t reflect your key message points perhaps your could communicate them more clearly, credibly or dramatically.
after the crises have passed, put together the a post crises summary report it should include the cause of the crises extend and tone of media coverage suggested improvement in the crises response process, ways to implement those changes and possible alterations to company policy and procedures.
after you have overcome the short term treat work to rebuild the good will from each of your key audience over the long term

Models and Theories Associated With Crisis Management
Crisis Management Model:
Successfully diffusing a crisis requires an understanding of how to handle a crisis – before it occurs. Gonzalez-Herrero and Pratt created a four-phase crisis management model process that includes: issues management, planning-prevention, the crisis, and post-crisis (Gonzalez-Herrero and Pratt, 1995).
Management Crisis Planning:
No corporation looks forward to facing a situation that causes a significant disruption to their business, especially one that stimulates extensive media coverage. Public scrutiny can result in a negative financial, political, legal and government impact. Crisis management planning deals with providing the best response to a crisis. (12Manage, 2007)
Contingency Planning:
Preparing contingency plans in advance, as part of a crisis management plan, is the first step to ensuring an organization is appropriately prepared for a crisis. Crisis management teams can rehearse crisis plan by developing a simulated scenario to use as a drill. The plan should clearly stipulate that the only people to speak publicly about the crisis are the designated persons, such as the company spokesperson or crisis team members. The first hours after a crisis breaks are the most crucial, so working with speed and efficiency is important, and the plan should indicate how quickly each function should be performed. When preparing to offer a statement externally as well as internally, information should be accurate. Providing incorrect or manipulated information has a tendency to backfire and will greatly exacerbate the situation. The contingency plan should contain information and guidance that will help decision makers to consider not only the short-term consequences, but the long-term effects of every decision. (12Manage, 2007)
Business Continuity Planning:
When a crisis will undoubtedly cause a significant disruption to an organization, a business continuity plan can help minimize the disruption. First, one must identify the critical functions and processes that are necessary to keep the organization running. Then each critical function and or/process must have its own contingency plan in the event that one of the functions/processes ceases or fails. Testing these contingency plans by rehearsing the required actions in a simulation will allow for all involved to become more sensitive and aware of the possibility of a crisis. As a result, in the event of an actual crisis, the team members will act more quickly and effectively. (12 Manage, 2007)
Structural-Functional Systems Theory:
Providing information to an organization in a time of crisis is critical to effective crisis management. Structural-functional systems theory addresses the intricacies of information networks and levels of command making up organizational communication. The structural-functional theory identifies information flow in organizations as "networks" made up of members and "links". Information in organizations flow in patterns called networks (Infants, Rancer, & Womack, 1997).
Diffusion of Innovation Theory:
Another theory that can be applied to the sharing of information is Diffusion of Innovation Theory. Developed by Everett Rogers, the theory describes how innovation is disseminated and communicated through certain channels over a period of time. Diffusion of innovation in communication occurs when an individual communicates a new idea to one or several others. At its most elementary form, the process involves: (1) an innovation, (2) an individual or other unit of adoption that has knowledge of or experience with using the innovation, (3) another individual or other unit that does not yet have knowledge of the innovation, and (4) a communication channel connecting the two units. A communication channel is the means by which messages get from one individual to another (Infante et al., 1997).

DEMOGRAPHY/POPULATION COMMUNICATION

QUESTION: What is Population Communication?

ANSWER: Before I define Population Communication, let me first of all define the words separately, thus Population and Communication.
Population as defined by the Cambridge International Dictionary of English is all the people living in a particular Country, Area or Place.
Again, in sociology and biology a population is the collection of people or organisms of a particular species living in a given geographic area or mortality, and migration. Though the field encompasses many dimensions of population change including the family (marriage & divorce), public health, work and the labour force, and family planning.
Communication on the other hand, is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged with each other. There are many auditory means, such as speaking, singing and sometimes tone of voice, and nonverbal, physical means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, or the writing.
Considering the above definitions we can simply say that population communication conveys messages about the collection of people or organisms of a particular species living in a given geographic area over a period of time.
But we cannot discuss population communication without talking about demography. This is because demography is the statistical study of all populations. It encompasses the study of the size, structure and distribution of populations, and how populations change over time due to births, deaths, migration, and ageing. Demographic analysis can relate to whole societies or to smaller groups defined by the criteria such as education, religion, or ethnicity.
Demography has been defined by several people over the years. Below are three definitions of demography taken from wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection.
Demography is the study of human populations in relation to the changes brought about by the interplay of births, deaths, and migration. Term is also used to refer to the actual phenomena observed, as in phrases such as the demography of tropical Africa.(Pressat 1985:54)
Demography is the statistical and mathematical study of the size, composition, and the spatial distribution of human populations, and of changes over time in these aspects through the operation of the five processes of fertility, mortality, marriage, migration, and social mobility. Although it maintains a continuous descriptive and comparative analysis of trends, in each of these processes and in their net result, its long-run goal is to develop a body of theory to explain the events that it charts and compares(Bogue 1969:1-2)
Hauser and Duncan(1959:2) also defined demography as the study of the size, territorial distribution, and the composition of population, changes therein, and the components of such changes, which may be identified as natality, mortality, territorial movement(migration), and social mobility(change of status) .
The study of human populations has its roots. Like sociology generally, in the societal changes that accompanied both the scientific and industrial revolutions. Some early mathematicians developed primitive forms of life tables, which are tables of life expectancies, for life insurance and actuarial purposes. Census, another demographic tool, was instituted for primarily political purposes:
As a basis for taxation
As a basis for political representation.
The development of demographic calculations started in the 18th century. Census taking, on the other hand, has a long history dating back close to 2,000 years among the Chinese and the Romans and even further back in history among groups in the Middle East. Most modern censuses began in the late 18th century. Demography relies on the large data sets that are primarily derived from censuses and the registration statistics (that is, birth, death, marriage registrations) large data sets over long periods of time (example the 2000 census in Ghana).
Population communication/demography plays various roles and functions in the society which goes a long way to enhance development. Some of the functions attributed to population communication/demography are as below:
Population communication supports immigration reforms. It helps check the number of people who enter and go out of the country. This sees to the number of people and the social amenities available before allowing immigrants into the country to avoid too much concentration on economic facilities.
Also Population Communication conveys messages to national leaders on the number of people living in their country, the birth rate, death rate, number of males and females in the country, the migration rate, and the people in the working age group. This helps national leaders to know which policies to formulate at any give time and also what social amenities to provide.
It again serves political purposes such as the basis of taxation based on the number of people in the working age group as well as serve as a basis for political representation.
Population Communication helps International Population Agencies like the Population Communication International (PCI), which is working worldwide, to develop entertainment-education programmes and social marking strategies that support targeted health and poverty alleviation initiatives. For more than twenty years PCI, has worked in over 27countries, producing more than 75 radio and television programmes, training hundreds of individual, and providing technical assistance to more than 100 international organizations.
Demographers are often multi-skilled, particularly if they gained first degrees in subjects such as geography, statistics or health, and have then studied demography at the graduate level. Training in demography will normally provide them with skills in computing and analysis as well as insights into population and health programmes and policies.
Students of demography thus find employment in a wide range of professional settings. In the public sector, demographers are employed in:
Government Statistical Offices, especially in the sections dealing with censuses, surveys, and the registration data.
National, State, and local planning bodies, especially in the educational and health planning, housing, and social policy.
Government research units in areas such as immigration and labour market analysis.
In development cooperation agencies such as AusAID and USAID.
Demographers can also be found in university research units and private consulting firms. Many international agencies, such as the United Nations Population Division and United Nations Fund for Population, and the non-government organizations also utilize the skills of demographers.
In the private sector demographic analysis is recognized as a vital part of market research and the investment planning.
In conclusion, one can say that the components affecting population change are measured by birth, death and migration rates that determine the numbers in the population, its age composition, and how fast it is growing or declining. Demographics are also concerned with the use of existing knowledge and techniques to identify and solve problems.

Censorship

Definition: forbiddance; ban
Antonyms: approval, compliment, encouragement, endorsement, praise, recommendation, sanction
Military History Companion: censorship
Censorship is strictly the review by an authority of any material before publication or dissemination, with the legal right to prevent, alter, or delay its appearance. The term is often loosely used to reflect voluntary arrangements between armed forces and the media, or in criticism of any system other than complete press freedom. Historically, censorship has been habitually practised by most governments, or other political and religious authorities. Censorship in the military sense has only become an issue in modern times, with the growth of liberal or democratic governments, and new methods of press communication. Its problems arise from a collision between traditional press freedoms and the needs of military security in wartime. The USA has occupied a special place in this story, through being the world's first literate democracy, and also through the constitutional position of the press. Much censorship has been by co-operation, and it has not been unusual for the media to ask for guidance or even direct censorship from the armed forces, rather than reveal wartime secrets.

The profession of war correspondent developed in the mid-19th century with the growth of the telegraph and widespread newspaper readership. The first wars on which reporting probably had a direct impact were the Crimean and the American civil wars. In the next fifty years vague censorship regulations were established in most western countries, but only supplementing more important informal arrangements. The Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war convinced the British in particular that a more formal system was needed.

At the start of WW I all belligerents had extensive censorship legislation and practices, although military attempts to exclude the press altogether from reporting the fighting fronts proved unsuccessful. This war also saw the extension of censorship to servicemen's letters home. Comments in letters analysed by censors became a tool for commanders in judging their own side's morale. WW II saw a revival of similar censorship practices, again with significant co-operation from the press. But this only applied chiefly to wars of national survival, and to the era of newspaper dominance. The last significant case of legally enforceable wartime censorship by the USA or Britain was the Korean war.

The rise of radio and television to supplant newspapers in the second half of the 20th century raised a number of new issues. Controversial but highly critical claims that the unrestricted reporting of American involvement in the Vietnam war had contributed to defeat produced concern on all sides. The result was the introduction by the USA and Britain of voluntary systems of press restraint, seen in the Falklands and the Gulf wars. Since then, developments in media communications technology have made censorship increasingly unfeasible.
US Supreme Court: Censorship
The Supreme Court has found censorship to be an especially intolerable restriction on freedom of expression. The term censorship might encompass almost any restriction on the dissemination or content of expression, but most fundamentally it means prior restraint-any government scheme for screening either who may speak or the content of what people wish to say before the utterance. Although the Court has never held prior restraint to be inherently unconstitutional, it has emphasized that “any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” (Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan 1963, p. 70).

The Court first directly addressed the constitutionality of prior restraint in Near v. Minnesota (1931). In question was a Minnesota law that allowed judges to eliminate as a public nuisance any “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” newspaper or periodical (see Libel). A state court had declared a newspaper, the Saturday Press, to be a public nuisance after it had attacked public officials with allegations of corruption, laziness, and illicit contact with gangsters. Much of the material seemed anti‐Semitic. The state court issued an order forever prohibiting the editors “from producing, editing, publishing, circulating, having in their possession, selling or giving away any publication whatsoever which is a malicious, scandalous or defamatory newspaper” either under the title of the Saturday Press or any other title (p. 706). Violation of the order would constitute contempt of court.

By a margin of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court found the statute to be an unconstitutional form of censorship, because before a banned newspaper could publish again, the editors would have to satisfy a judge as to the new publication's good character. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes for the majority concluded that prior restraint would be constitutional only in extreme circumstances, for example, if a newspaper were about to publish the location of troops in wartime. Speaking for dissenters, Justice Pierce Butler protested that the Minnesota law did not constitute a classic form of censorship because the newspaper had published nine issues before being suppressed. He noted that the law “does not authorize administrative control in advance such as was formerly exercised by the licensers and censors” (p. 735).

In subsequent cases, the Court disapproved of administrative licensing of speech where the licenser can make decisions based on the context of the would‐be speaker's expression. For example, in Lovell v. Griffin (1938) the Court held unconstitutional an ordinance banning distribution of literature without permission of the city manager, where the manager had carte blanche to grant or deny permits. Likewise, the Court in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1951) found unconstitutional a New York scheme under which exhibition licenses could be denied to motion pictures found to be “sacrilegious.” Nor would the Court allow the postmaster general to revoke Esquire magazine's second‐class mailing privileges on grounds that the publication was not contributing sufficiently to the public good and welfare (Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 1946). The Court struck down injunctions prohibiting newspapers from publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers, classified documents that had been leaked to the press (New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971). And it held that judges could not prohibit journalists from publishing material potentially prejudicial to a criminal defendant when such material was obtained in open court (Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 1976).

On the other hand, the Court is likely to allow licensing systems that minimize administrative discretion, regulate the time, place, and manner of expression without regard to its content, and are guided by clear and specific standards (Cox v. New Hampshire, 1941; Poulos v. New Hampshire, 1953). The Court has allowed government censorship of obscene movies, but only if stringent procedures are followed, including prompt judicial review (Freedman v. Maryland, 1965). The Court has also granted public elementary and secondary schools broad power to censor student publications (Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 1988). It has also concluded that the federal government has broad power to require many government employees to submit to censorship of their speech and writing even after they leave government employment and even when unclassified material is involved (Snepp v. United States, 1980). Further, the Court has held that people who disobey court orders restraining expression may be punished for contempt even if the restriction is likely to be found unconstitutional (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 1967).

The Near decision itself has been invoked to justify prior restraint, which has led critics to complain that the Court has provided no clear theory or standards for determining when prior restraint is permissible. In the Pentagon Papers Case, justices on both sides of the decision used Near to support their positions-some for the proposition that prior restraint is presumptively unconstitutional, but others for the proposition that exceptional circumstances can justify prior restraint. And when, in 1979, a federal district court issued an injunction prohibiting The Progressive magazine from publishing an article purporting to explain how to build a hydrogen bomb, the judge concluded that the article was analogous to the types of exceptional circumstances listed in Near (United States v. The Progressive). (The injunction was lifted after similar material was published elsewhere and the government dropped the case.)

In recent years, spirited scholarly debate has arisen over the question of whether the evil of prior restraint might be overstated. Some have argued that judicially imposed restraints are less serious than administrative censorship, that freedom of expression may be served better by the use of prior restraint than by severely punishing expression after the fact. Fear of severe subsequent punishment, they assert, may have a far greater “chilling effect” on speech than narrowly focused, judicially supervised prior restraint.

The Supreme Court appears thus far not to have been swayed by such argument. It appears to remain committed to the view that censorship, whether imposed by administrators or by judges, is presumptively unconstitutional and the most deplorable way of restricting freedom of expression.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: censorship

Act of changing or suppressing speech or writing that is considered subversive of the common good. In the past, most governments believed it their duty to regulate the morals of their people; only with the rise in the status of the individual and individual rights did censorship come to seem objectionable. Censorship may be preemptive (preventing the publication or broadcast of undesirable information) or punitive (punishing those who publish or broadcast offending material). In Europe, both the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches practiced censorship, as did the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Authoritarian governments such as those in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union have employed pervasive censorship, which is generally opposed by underground movements engaged in the circulation of samizdat literature. In the U.S. in the 20th century, censorship focused largely on works of fiction deemed guilty of obscenity (e.g., James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover), though periodic acts of political censorship also occurred (e.g., the effort to purge school textbooks of possible left-wing content in the 1950s). In the late 20th century, some called for censorship of so-called hate speech, language deemed threatening (or sometimes merely offensive) to various subsections of the population. Censorship in the U.S. is usually opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Germany after World War II it became a crime to deny the Holocaust or to publish pro-Nazi publications. See also Pentagon Papers.
Russian History Encyclopedia: Censorship
Censorship informally began in Russia when the regime acquired the realm's first printing press about 1560, a century after the invention of movable type. From then until the late 1600s successive tsars confined the use of that press, and the few more imported, to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Peter I (r. 1682 - 1725) expanded his government's monopoly to include secular publishing when, in 1702, he founded Russia's first newspaper The St. Petersburg Bulletin to promote himself and his programs. In 1720, having added the Senate and Academy of Sciences as official publishers, he required the ecclesiastical college to approve in advance every book printed in Russia, a censorship role that he passed the next year to the newlycreated Holy Synod. Synod authority over secular publishing ended in 1750 when Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741 - 1762) gave the Academy of Sciences the right to censor its publications, as she did Moscow University at its founding in 1755.
When Catherine II (r. 1762 - 1796) finally made private ownership and use of printing presses legal in 1783, her decree governing "free publishing" banned published words against "the laws of God and the state" or of a "clearly-seditious" nature. The police would henceforth supervise "free" presses and serve as preliminary censors. Alarmed by the French Revolution, Catherine ended her reign by closing private presses and by opening new censorship offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, Catherine's reign marked a stage in widening limits on the publishing of periodicals and books in Russia.
Sharing Catherine II's early belief in private publishing, Alexander I (r. 1801 - 1825) reinstated private presses, along with a preliminary censorship system. He set its rules in 1804 in Russia's first, brief censorship statute, a major reform designed to make the exercise of state power more predictable and rational. Napoleon's invasion in 1812, however, caused Alexander I to tighten censorship and to embrace the intense religiosity that spread during the war. Because the tsar resumed peacetime rule as a religious mystic, his choice to head his new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Education in 1817 was the president of the Russian Bible Society, A. N. Golitsyn, a zealot who used his role as chief censor to promote his religious views and to disseminate Bibles. Repeated complaints from high officials of the Russian Orthodox Church persuaded the Emperor to dismiss Golitsyn in 1824, the year before Alexander I died.
At the very outset of his reign, Nicholas I (r. 1825 - 1855) had to put down the Decembrist revolt led by gentry liberals. Blaming alien Western beliefs for discontent, the new tsar resolved to permeate society with Russian ideals and to prove, through paternalistic rule and controlled publishing that autocracy itself was inherently right for Russia.
Nicholas I in June 1826 issued his secular censorship law of June 1826 as a means to "direct public opinion into agreeing with present political circumstances and the views of the government." No less than 230 articles (five times the forty-six in the 1804 law) detailed procedures and made the author, not the censor, responsible should a duly censored text prove unacceptable once published (reversing the 1804 law).
Bowing to criticism among his officials, Nicholas named a new drafting committee and signed a substantially more liberal, but still sweeping, law of April 1828 to govern all works of "Literature, Science, and Art" (under it, responsibility again fell on the approving censor). A Foreign Censorship Committee had to publish monthly a list of the foreign works it had banned. Issued at the same time was a new ecclesiastical censorship statute that confirmed the Holy Synod's right - through censors chosen from ecclesiastical academies - to ban any book, work of art, ceremony, musical composition, or performance contrary to precepts of the Orthodox Church.
Nicholas also made censors of his new political police, the Third Section. To counter clandestine printing of illegal works and lax censorship of legal ones, he secretly ordered his special police to look for and report anything "inclined to the spread of atheism or which reflects in the artist or writer violations of the obligations of loyal subjects." One year after the French and Belgian Revolutions of 1830, Nicholas I put down the Polish rebellion. Building on popular support, the tsar in 1833 prescribed a system of ideas - so-called "Official Nationality" - to guide his subjects and his officials, including censors.
With respect to the state's granting licenses for private periodicals, the tsar himself approved or rejected applications, with the result that the mere forty-two private periodicals that circulated in 1825 had, by 1841, modestly increased to sixty. (Small readerships also forced a number of licensed periodicals to close for lack of profits.) As for books, limited statistics that begin with 1837 show that secular censors in that year approved more titles (838) than in 1845 (804) and 1846 (810), such numbers being minuscule compared to book production in Europe.
Although limits on publishing under Nicholas I from 1825 to 1855 were the most invasive in Imperial history, brilliant writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy won censors' approval under Nicholas I.
Assuming power in the last stages of the humiliating Crimean War, Alexander II (r. 1855 - 1881) blamed that debacle on Russia's backwardness and the archaic enserfment of 40 million peasants. To promote their liberation, in 1857 he lifted the de facto ban on publishing proposals for liberation.
On the heels of decreeing Emancipation in February 1861, Alexander II committed to reform of censorship and thirteen months later in March, 1862, ended preliminary censorship for all scientific, academic, and official publications. Then followed, five months after the 1864 judicial reform, the decree of April 6, 1865 to give "relief and convenience to the national press." Included as transitional for uncensored publications was a system of warnings that could lead to suspensions and closures for any showing a "dangerous orientation." Freed from censorship - but only in St. Petersburg and Moscow - were all periodicals, translated books of 320 pages or more, and original books of 160 pages or more. (Short books were not freed, given their greater potential to do harm.) A big change was the statute's subjecting to judicial prosecution anyone responsible for criminal content in a freed publication.
In December 1866, the State Council declared that full freedom to publish would "take shape under the influence of a series of judicial decisions." During the next decade, as mounting terrorism made the tsar wary of public opinion, the government all but abandoned press-related trials. New measures against the press included profit-cutting limits on street sales and commercial advertisements. Whereas officials used the warning system from 1865 through 1869 to suspend merely ten freed periodicals, they suspended twenty-seven from 1875 through 1879. On the other hand, the number of active journals rose from twelve in 1865 to twenty in 1879; of newspapers, from forty-one in 1865 to sixty-two in 1879.
That trend reversed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, because Alexander III (r. 1881 - 1894) repressed publishing. As one means, he created a Supreme Commission on Press Affairs in 1882 to silence not just "dangerous" periodicals but also, through temporary banishment from journalism, their editors and publishers. The Commission imposed closure, its harshest penalty, seven times from 1881 to 1889 - a period when the overall number of journals and newspapers declined just over 22 and 11 percentage points, respectively.
Given the seeming containment of terrorism by 1890, an easing of restrictions let the number of journals and newspapers rise; and the total stood once more at the 1881 level when Nicholas II (r. 1894 - 1917) acceded to the throne. Ten years later, during the 1905 Revolution, civil disobedience in printing plants effectively ended state controls that included censorship. In October, following a government decree that no printing plant could operate if it bypassed press regulations, the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workmen's Deputies ordered members of the Printers' Union to refuse to work for plant owners who complied.
Not only did Nicholas II issue his Manifesto of October 17, 1905 to promise imminent freedom of expression and other reforms, but he also ordered his new prime minister, Sergei I. Witte, to draft legislation to effect such changes. New rules for periodicals resulted on November 24, 1905. In issuing them, the tsar claimed to have shifted wholly to judicial controls and thereby to have granted "one of the fundamental freedoms." Promised new rules on book publishing took effect on April 26, 1906, and they allowed most books simultaneously to reach the public and the governing Committee on Press Affairs. Excepted were works of fewer than seventeen pages (censors had to approve them at least two days before publication), and those from seventeen to eighty pages (censors had to screen them a week in advance). The new rules let officials close an indicted publication pending what could be protracted adjudication.
Book-related trials in the remainder of 1906 mounted to an all-time high of 223, with 175 convictions. Those persons found criminally responsible for circulating or attempting to circulate a work ruled illegal mainly suffered fines, not imprisonment; for the main aim of the government was judicially to identify criminal content and to keep it from the public. Because the publishing industry became so large in the next decade, the tsarist regime found it almost impossible to limit printed opinion. By 1914, Russian citizens enjoyed freedom of expression very nearly equal to Western levels.
War with the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires in 1914 caused the tsar to impose military censorship on private publishing. Then followed the heightening domestic turmoil that culminated in the 1917 revolution, ending Imperial Russia and a relatively free press; for Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who seized power in November, so well knew the power of the printed word that they eliminated privately-controlled publishing companies. Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist and memoirist, provides a measure of the change in this summation: "Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Vladimir Lenin's and Josef Stalin's regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia." Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin bested all rivals to emerge as the leader of the Party by the next year. Under him in 1936, the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics made clear that publishing was to achieve the objectives of the socialist order as determined by the Communist Party. Harsh penalties awaited violators of laws against "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."
Enforcing limits on the printed word - and all cultural and artistic expression - was maintained by means of a vast censorship apparatus known as Glavlit (the Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets) and only official institutions published newspapers (e.g., the Communist Party published Pravda). Each publishing house answered to the State Committee for Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade. Party authorities approved all editors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and journals.
After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began his eight-year dominance (1956 - 1964) as first secretary, and his effort to "de-Stalinize" the USSR brought his famous but short-lived "thaw" in censorship, especially with respect to literary and scholarly journals and the newspaper Izvestiia. Direct criticisms of the founding principles of the state or of system of government remained illegal, however, until 1986 when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as general secretary, liberalized publishing practices under the term glasnost.
Columbia Encyclopedia: censorship,
official prohibition or restriction of any type of expression believed to threaten the political, social, or moral order. It may be imposed by governmental authority, local or national, by a religious body, or occasionally by a powerful private group. It may be applied to the mails, speech, the press, the theater, dance, art, literature, photography, the cinema, radio, television, or computer networks. Censorship may be either preventive or punitive, according to whether it is exercised before or after the expression has been made public. In use since antiquity, the practice has been particularly thoroughgoing under autocratic and heavily centralized governments, from the Roman Empire to the totalitarian states of the 20th cent.
In the United States
Censorship has existed in the United States since colonial times; its emphasis has gradually shifted from the political to the sexual.
Political Censorship
Attempts to suppress political freedom of the press in the American colonies were recurrent; one victory against censorship was the trial of John Peter Zenger. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, speech, and religion. Nevertheless, there have been examples of official political censorship, notably in the actions taken under the Sedition Act of 1798 (see Alien and Sedition Acts), suppression of abolitionist literature in the antebellum South, and local attempts in the 19th and 20th cent. to repress publications considered radical. During the cold war many Americans worked to keep textbooks and teaching that they considered deleterious to “the American form of government” out of schools and colleges; many others opposed this effort (see academic freedom).
The issue of government secrecy was dealt with in the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, which stated that, with some exceptions, people have the right of access to government records. The issue was challenged in 1971, when a secret government study that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers was published by major newspapers. The government sued to stop publication, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers (see press, freedom of the).
Cultural Censorship
Long before World War I there were vigilante attacks, such as those by Anthony Comstock, on what was reckoned obscene literature, and the U.S. Post Office expanded (1873) its ban on the shipment of obscene literature and art, but it was after World War I that public controversy over censorship raged most fiercely. Until the Tariff Act was amended in 1930, many literary classics were not allowed entry into the United States on grounds of obscenity. Even after the act's amendment censorship attempts persisted, and James Joyce's Ulysses was not allowed into the country until 1933, after a court fight. Noted works of literature involved in obscenity cases included Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and Fanny Hill by John Cleland. Over a 15-year period beginning in 1957, a series of Supreme Court decisions relaxed restrictions on so-called obscene materials, although not all obscenity prosecutions during this time were dismissed; in a famous case in the 1960s publisher Ralph Ginzburg was convicted of advertising in an obscene manner.
As Supreme Court decisions struck down many obscenity statutes, states responded by enacting laws prohibiting the sale of obscene materials to minors, and these were upheld (1968) by the Supreme Court. In decisions handed down in 1973 and 1987, the Court ruled that local governments could restrict works if they were without “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” and were at the same time seen, by local standards, to appeal to prurient interest. From the 1960s, the issue of sex education in schools was highly controversial; more recently, the question of AIDS education has stirred debate. In the 1980s, some feminists attempted to ban pornography as injurious to women. Other activists, concerned with racism and other forms of bigotry, lobbied for the suppression of what came to be called hate speech.
The producers of motion pictures, dependent for success on widespread public approval, somewhat reluctantly adopted a self-regulatory code of morals in the 1920s (see Hays, Will H.). This was replaced after 1966 by a voluntary rating system under the supervision of the Motion Picture Producers Association; the need to tailor a movie to fit a ratings category has acted as a form of censorship.
Since 1934, local radio (and later, television) stations have operated under licenses granted by the Federal Communications Commission, which is expressly forbidden to exercise censorship. However, the required periodical review of a station's license invites indirect censorship. The Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that indecent material could be banned from commercial cable-television stations but not from public-access cable stations.
The rapid growth of the Internet presents another set of issues. The Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1996 and signed by President Bill Clinton, was overturned by the Supreme Court for the restrictions it placed on adult access to and use of constitutionally protected material and communication on the Internet. The Children's Internet Protection Act (2001), which requires libraries and schools to install antipornography filters on computers with federally financed Internet access, was upheld, however, because it was only a condition attached to the acceptance of federal funding and not a general prohibition on access.
In Other Countries
In other countries, censorship is accepted as inevitable in times of war, and it has been imposed to varying degrees even in peacetime. In the Middle Ages, attempts to silence heresy through intimidation, particularly through the establishment of the Inquisition, were examples of censorship, as are modern instances of book banning. The absolute monarchs of the 17th and 18th cent. imposed strict controls, and because the Reformation had resulted in a reshuffling of the relations between church and state, these controls were used to persecute opponents of the established religion of a particular state, Roman Catholic or Protestant. A form of book-banning was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in the Index, a list of publications that the faithful were forbidden to read. The last edition of the Index was published in 1948; in 1966 Pope Paul VI decreed that it would be discontinued. Paradoxically, in the lands under Calvinist domination (such as Geneva, Scotland, and England of the Puritan period) where the ideals of liberty and freedom first blossomed, regulation of private conduct and individual opinion was rigorous, and censorship was strong.
Strict censorship of all forms of public expression characterized the Soviet Union throughout most of its 74-year history. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, was not permitted publication there, and the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, considered by many to be masterpieces, were banned in 1966. Soviet censorship ended in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost (openness).
In Britain during the 19th and 20th cent., the object of censorship has most often been literature regarded as obscene. With the passage of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857, there followed many criminal prosecutions and seizures of books. This law remained in effect until 1959, when a new law provided that the opinion of artistic or literary experts could be submitted as evidence in deciding obscenity cases and that work alleged to be obscene had to be judged as a whole rather than in part. However, when the editors of an underground periodical, Oz, were convicted in 1971 for violating postal laws, an appeal court held that a periodical need not be judged as a whole, an apparent reversal of the 1959 act.
Psychoanalysis: Censorship
The term censorship in everyday language connotes ideas of blame and repression of faults. This is how it appears in Freud in Studies on Hysteria: "we are very often astonished," he writes, "to realize in what a mutilated state all the ideas and scenes emerged which we extracted from the patient by procedure of pressing. Precisely the essential elements of the picture were missing [...] I will give one or two examples of the way in which a censoring of this kind operates . . ." (1895b, p. 281-282). He then shows that what is censored is what appears to the patient to be blameworthy, shameful, and inadmissible. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss (December 22, 1897, in 1950a) he compares this psychic work to the censorship that the czarist regime imposed on Russian newspapers at the time: "Words, sentences and whole paragraphs are blacked out, with the result that the remainder is unintelligible" (1950a, p. 240).
Although the term appears quite frequently in writings from this first period, its status remains uncertain. Freud seems to be describing the deliberate suppression by patients, in their communication with the doctor, of what they do not wish to reveal to him, as well as the mechanism and effects of unconscious repression (1896b). A second meaning appears when he evokes the censorship which, in dream-work, results in a manifest text being presented as a riddle (Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a).
The metapsychological texts of 1915 elaborate on the distinctions outlined in chapter seven of the Interpretation of Dreams. Censorship is in fact defined as that which opposes the return of that which is repressed, at the two successive levels in the passage from the unconscious to the preconscious (the "antechamber") and on to the conscious (the "drawing-room") (1915e).
Censorship is thus clearly distinguished from repression: whereas repression rejects a representation and/or an affect into the unconscious, censorship is what prevents it from re-emerging. Freud nevertheless confuses this distinction later when he writes, for example: "We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed" (1916-17a, p. 429). With the introduction of the structural theory Freud made a new distinction, with the ego becoming the agent of the censorship under the superego-the merciless supervisor (1923b).
Although the notion of censorship continues to be fairly widely used in psychoanalysis to describe resistance to the treatment, it has scarcely received any further elaboration and its global nature may cause it to appear to be somewhat outmoded.
History 1450-1789: Censorship
Censorship began in the sixteenth century as the effort to prohibit religious ideas that were deemed heretical. From the beginning religious censorship was only possible when civil governments agreed that it was needed and provided the police authority for enforcement. In the following two centuries the state gradually took complete control, with little or no participation by clergymen. The effectiveness of censorship waxed and waned according to the perceived threat of alleged heretical, seditious, or immoral books as well as local circumstances. Censorship was strongest during the sixteenth century when Catholic and Protestant states sought to enforce religious uniformity, and weakest during the antireligious and politically liberal Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, censorship of books, speech, and theater never completely disappeared because almost all state and church authorities felt that it was a legitimate and necessary means of protecting the populace from destructive ideas.


The Protestant Reformation
Little censorship existed before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. Civil governments did not permit overt political criticism within the state, but they could do little about denunciations from beyond their borders. Because there was widespread agreement about the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, little censorship of religious and philosophical ideas existed.
The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation stimulated the beginning of religious censorship. Since Protestants promulgated their views through the printing press, and Catholics replied via the same medium, it was inevitable that both sides would try to control the press. But they waited until all hope of reconciliation ended in the middle of the sixteenth century before establishing censorship machinery. Then both sides developed similar policies.
Press censorship needed three components to be effective. First, an individual or a group had to determine which books, authors, and ideas were dangerous-a commission of experts had to prepare a list of objectionable previously published books. Second, prepublication censorship was needed to ensure that new books propagating heretical, seditious, or immoral ideas would not be published. Governments had to establish committees of readers, composed of clergymen and civil officials, to review manuscripts before issuing permissions to print. Prepublication censorship would become the most widespread and effective kind of censorship. Third, the civil authority used its police powers to keep banned books from entering the state and, if possible, to remove them from bookstores and libraries. This part of censorship was never very effective.
The papacy fulfilled the first requirement by promulgating a series of Indexes of Prohibited Books, the most important of which were the Tridentine Index of 1564, so called because the Council of Trent authorized it, and its successor, the Clementine Index of 1596, promulgated by Pope Clement VIII. Additional indexes followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at widely scattered intervals. Indexes listed authors and titles that could not be printed, read, or held, plus rules to guide those carrying out prepublication censorship and expurgation (elimination of objectionable passages in books otherwise acceptable). Catholic state and church authorities cooperated relatively effectively in censorship actions despite numerous disagreements and jurisdictional conflicts. For example, France never accepted the papal indexes but still banned Protestant books and ideas.
Protestant censorship followed the same paths except that no supranational Protestant church existed to direct and coordinate censorship. Since Protestant religious leaders invested the state with substantial authority over the church, the state assumed the leading role in censorship. Each Protestant state had to decide which books to ban and how to censor. Protestant states banned the publication, importation, and ownership of Catholic works, and sometimes the works of other Protestants. They also condemned books considered immoral and critical of the government. Although Protestant censorship has been little studied, it is likely that England and the Calvinist canton of Geneva had the most effective Protestant censorship in the sixteenth century.
Both Catholic and Protestant churches and states regulated what was preached in the pulpit and taught in universities. Prepublication censors sometimes dictated that scholars accept unwelcome changes in their works. Authors exercised some degree of self-censorship. A few scholars in both Catholic and Protestant worlds lost university positions, or suffered worse, because of their religious views. Political censorship also intensified in the late sixteenth century as governments attempted to stem a flood of vitriolic anonymous political pamphlets criticizing rulers and supporting rebellion, especially in France.
State Censorship
Although censorship began as a result of the religious division of Europe, civil governments quickly took complete control of censorship of books and theater. France is a good example. Beginning in the 1530s the monarchy issued a series of decrees that sought to ban Protestant literature. By the early seventeenth century a multiplicity of censors existed. Hence, in 1672 the monarchy established a college of censors, a group of scholars appointed to read manuscripts intended for publication and to grant the publisher the right to print the book, called a privilège. By the eighteenth century the number of French censors ranged from 150 to 200. The college exercised prepublication censorship and awarded exclusive publication rights to one publisher, thus protecting him from piracy by others.
English censorship of printed works began when Henry VIII (ruled 1509-1547) sought to protect the national church from other doctrines and his monarchy from attacks. Succeeding monarchs used censorship to enforce different religious establishments. Edward VI (ruled 1547-1553) allowed Protestant works, while Mary Tudor (ruled 1553-1558) banned them. Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) passed numerous laws censoring the press and the theater to ensure that they respected her version of the English Church, did not publish Catholic views, and did not criticize the monarchy. In 1557 the crown created the Stationers' Company to issue licenses to print. The requirement that every book had to be licensed helped control the press. English monarchs continued a policy of state censorship over the next two centuries, although the purpose of censorship increasingly became that of shielding the monarchy from any criticism. Nevertheless, the shifting policies of the crown toward the national church, Puritanism, and Catholicism produced considerable variation from regime to regime in the seventeenth century, resulting in less effective censorship. Publishers of obscene, seditious, and blasphemous matter simply published without permission. So in 1695 England and Wales ended pre-publication censorship of written materials. The practice of locating and destroying books and prosecuting publishers had always been difficult, and that also waned, but censorship of the stage remained.
Every other large and small political unit had similar censorship systems, sometimes including representatives of the local church. But the local nature of censorship, limited to the boundaries of the state or city, was its weakness. Authors and printers wishing to publish political or religious criticism only needed to go to the next state to publish their works. Then the international commercial network of the book trade, including book fairs at Frankfurt and elsewhere, distributed the books throughout Europe. Finally, newspapers in the late seventeenth century created a new publication that was difficult to censor. Because newspapers were local and ephemeral, any censorship had to be quick and local. The censorship machinery of the sixteenth century was organized to censor learned works of religion, philosophy, and politics and could not adapt easily to newspapers, plus broadsides and other ephemeral matter, which were printed overnight on cheap paper, often without the names of author and printer, and were quickly distributed.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, especially in the years from 1750 to 1789, significantly weakened but did not eliminate censorship. Many Enlightenment philosophes deplored it, especially religious censorship, partly because they wrote many antireligious works. Rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740-1786), Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740-1780) and Joseph II (Holy Roman emperor, 1765-1790; king of Austria, 1780-1790), Empress Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762-1796), and King Charles III of Spain (ruled 1759-1788), who were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, permitted more religious and literary freedom of expression. However, when writers began to publish works criticizing absolutist government and demanding expanded political rights for citizens, the rulers again tightened censorship. But they did not, and could not, return censorship to its earlier state.
In France, Enlightenment pressures seriously weakened the privilège system, as censors permitted the publication of ideas that had previously been banned. Numerous publishers in smaller states just beyond the borders of France published many works without privilèges, then sent them into France. The loosening of censorship permitted an avalanche of political pamphlets critical of the monarchy and the church, which helped bring on the French Revolution.